What's Done In the Dark

Aziraphale sat up slowly and took Crowley’s hand. He turned it over, looked at the light coming from his wrist and arm from every angle. Then he brought it to his lips and kissed Crowley’s palm.
“This is what you meant,” he said, lips still against Crowley’s skin. “In 1832. You meant it literally. You glow.”
“You glow,” Crowley said. “You burn. You just sometimes also burn through me. It’s a reaction, I think. Because your holiness doesn’t belong in me.”
“Dearest,” Aziraphale said. “Heat cannot start a fire if there is nothing to burn.”
(Or, the one where Crowley is drawn to Aziraphale's holy flame like a moth ready to catch fire.)

Notes:

This is a fic that's about heat and light and accepting who you have become, especially if you didn't mean to become that person. It's also about love, because it's hard to find true heat, light, and acceptance without it. I just have so many feelings about Crowley and how he remembers being covered in starlight. Did writing this get them out of my system? Probably not, but it was a good attempt!
Thank you to the clutch of tumblr mutuals who have been cheering this on, but especially to @z-bot, who has been its most fervent supporter.
My tumblr is @charmingpplincardigans in case you feel the need to come cheer on any future poor life choices.
The title was of course stolen from Johnny Cash's 'God's Gonna Cut You Down': But as sure as God made black and white, what's done in the dark will be brought to the light.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

"The claim that God has worked a miracle implies that God has singled out certain persons for some benefit which many others do not receive implies that God is unfair."

-James Keller, "A Moral Argument against Miracles" in Faith and Philosophy Vol. 12

I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame.

-Mary Oliver, Blue Pastures

4004 BC

The first rain on the new planet had two celestial witnesses.

Crawley stood beneath a shelter of startlingly white wing and watched the heavy virgin drops hit the sand beyond the wall, the stones of the wall, and the angel next to him. The angel had his face tilted up to the sky, eyes closed, and he let water sluice down his cheeks and neck without moving to wipe it away. He was starting to glow just a little with the rapture of this new sensation.

Crawley was envious of his light, of the warmth the angel was radiating. He hadn’t been warm since his Fall. Hell had so many fires, but none of them were made to warm a being of dense coldness like he’d become. It was why he had been so relieved when the prince had told him to head topside and gave him access to a shape that was roughly that of a human, a terrestrial identity to slip into. He thought the sun would offer a nice reprieve. He thought this new skin might trap the heat to itself and allow him to become his own sun.

The sun, far away as it was, was nothing compared to this being’s light. The angel may have given away his flaming sword, but the flame had not left him.

Crawley shuffled closer to try and capture some of the angel’s warmth. He accidentally knocked the tip of a white wing with the edge of his black one. The angel turned to look at him, careful not to remove the sheltering wing from over Crawley’s head. The rapture on his face had broken, but curiosity was blooming.

“Oh, I-” Crawley said, and leaned like he might step away.

“No, no,” the angel reassured quickly. He reached for Crawley’s arm, but remembered himself at the last minute and merely gestured toward him. “You don’t have to go.”

Crawley looked down at his feet, bare against the wet stone. If it had been a holy rain, if he was going to burn, he would be burning. The water was no danger to him, but that did not stop the angel from covering him anyway. The angel’s eager smile might be a danger to him, but what kind of a demon would he be if he stepped away from a good feeling just because the voice in the back of his head told him he might not survive this?

That voice was always going off. It had caused him to Fall, but that hadn’t killed him. It was unlikely this angel would.

“You sure it’s safe for you to be around me?” he asked. Half in jest, half not.

The angel smiled. “What are you going to do, tempt me? I already know your game, serpent.”

“I just might,” Crawley said. He smiled back at the angel. Hoped his face looked easy, winning. “What is it angels want?”

“Nothing.” The angel turned his face back up to the rain. “Nothing that you can give me, anyway.”

The way he sighed and let the edges of his wing brush against Crawley’s made that feel less certain than he sounded.

33 AD

The people of the Earth did as they were instructed and multiplied. Crawley watched them grow from a family to a community to a town to a city and then out past the borders of the land that had been given to them. They grew hungry. They stopped waiting to be gifted things and started to take them.

For a while that was where Crawley lived, in the human breaths between hesitation and excitement. Whenever a person saw something they wanted—a fig, a goat, a jar of water, another human—Crawley would sidle up next to them and suggest that they should have it. Or, when he was feeling particularly insidious, that they deserved it.

He fashioned himself after the hungriest among them: thin, with eyes that never left the horizon, with teeth that went ahead of him wherever he went, ready to bite at the first whiff of fear or loneliness in another. It was a camouflage meant to cover his own loneliness. He paired it with dark robes for his body and dark scarves that he kept wrapped around his face and neck. It trapped the heat to him in a way that almost balanced out the cold at his core. It also kept the dust and rain and gratuitous questions out.

The flood came and went. The human race shrank and then grew again. For a while he kept count of both the people and the rains, but that became more and more impossible with every new year, so he stopped marking the passing of both. Instead he started marking his time in small moments of the Divine.

For the most part this meant run ins with angels. There was Aziraphale from the wall of course, who always seemed to welcome Crawley’s presence in a way no one else had in a very, very long time. There were other angels too, less patient and less understanding of the fact that he was just living up to his nature, just being the thing that they had made him when they tossed him out of Heaven and into a pit. These beings always wanted to fight with him, or just smite him on sight.

He did not want to be smote, so he buried himself in among humanity. He hid in plain sight, unless he was given strict instructions not to, and rarely took his wings out. That was something of a loss, because there was nothing like the feeling of desert winds in his wings. Down in Hell it was so crowded a demon was lucky if they could get one wing out over a pit of sulfur, and then the smell would be there for months. It was hardly worth it.

Up here there was nothing but space. If you tilted your head the right way you could pretend like there was nothing in the whole world but sky so blue and deep it felt like you could drown in it. If he stood in a sandstorm and pitched his wings the right way he could almost catch a draft. The sand stung as it pricked against his exposed skin. It felt like it was going to wear him away to nothing, but it was worth it for remembering what it had been like to fly.

That was how he met the carpenter. He had been in the desert alone, just trying to remember what it felt like to be himself from before. Then out of nowhere there was this broken, thirsty young man fighting devils in his mind that Crawley did not think he’d ever be privy to. The man was not an angel, but he was Divine all the same. So Crawley took note, marked it on his tally, and did what he did best—he showed the man every dream that had come to fruition since that first rain. Most of them humanity’s, but some of them Crowley’s own.

Those Divine eyes on him made him feel more centered than he had in ages. It was easier to breathe somehow when he had a captive audience, when someone saw him for what he was—part serpent, part angel, part human, part darkness. It blew on an ember buried deep within him and only left him colder for the remembrance of it.

Then the wind changed and he was stood next to the angel from the wall again. They watched that young man be nailed to a cross. The ember went out.

He never wanted to be on his belly again. He changed his name.

“Why are you wrapped like that?” Aziraphale asked him.

They stood together as witnesses in the red-gold drench of the sunset as it hit the foot of the hill and waited for the pitiful crying to stop.

“Like what?”

“With your head and face hidden. Like the women.”

“Why? What’s wrong with it?”

Crowley couldn’t work out why it mattered. He was as entitled to his decisions as anyone else.

On one level, Crowley admired the women, these women in particular at least. He didn’t know them, but he knew they cared very much for this man who had drawn a very bad card from the ineffable's deck. Crowley had only met the carpenter the one time, but such a light shone through him that even now he wanted to look away. It was like staring directly at the sun. It was like staring at Aziraphale. Crowley thought that was what the women were responding to in this man as well, in which case he could relate.

On another level, why not dress like women?

Aziraphale frowned. “No, I don't-I mean why are you dressed like you're in mourning?”

“A man is being murdered right over there,” Crowley said. “Maybe I am in mourning.”

“I didn’t know it was possible for demons to mourn. Aren’t you supposed to be the architects of all human destruction? It seems like mourning would get in the way of that. Just a bit.”

Crowley looked the angel up and down and tried to remember if he’d looked so soft the last time he’d seen him. His eyes were very, very blue. “You don’t know a lot of things.”

“No, I suppose that’s true,” Aziraphale said. He looked down at his hands where they were clasped against his stomach.

“I didn’t know it was possible for angels to be humble,” Crowley said.

Aziraphale gave the sort of choked laugh that remembered its place and quickly shrank away in the dimming light. “I try not to make a habit of it.”

“But you can’t help it, can you?”

“What makes you say that?”

He had Aziraphale’s full attention now. The angel’s curiosity had become a familiar touch point over the years. Crowley could tell he thought too much. Close to too much anyway. If Aziraphale did truly think too much then the two of them would not be standing on opposite sides of all creation. There had to be some sort of failsafe in the angel, maybe. There had to be something that caught his mind before it dove over the deep end, some salvation that Crowley had not been created with. Maybe God had made the Principalities to be a better model of creature. No, not better. More obedient.

“You love them,” Crowley said, truly realizing it only as he spoke the words out loud.

Aziraphale loved. Certainly angels had Fallen for that. At least one had been murdered. He remembered the bloody aftermath as clearly as he remembered his first given name. But maybe that had been different. Humans seemed to have all kinds of love. Never ending varieties of it that caught Crowley by surprise over and over again, usually when he was just starting to feel comfortable with the idea that he had seen everything.

“And I suppose you hate them, do you?” Aziraphale asked. He lifted his chin and straightened his shoulders as if preparing to fight Crowley off if it came to that.

Crowley frowned and took a step back. He held his hands up to show there was nothing in them, not even ill intent. “What? No! Why would I hate them?”

“But you don’t love them.” Aziraphale tilted his head and steepled his fingers, thoughtful. “No, I guess you wouldn’t, considering.”

“There are an awful lot of shades of feeling in between the two, I find.”

“Right.” Azirphale tutted, indignant. “Of course I love them. That’s what I’m meant to do.”

“Are you sure?”

“Aren’t you?”

Crowley smiled. He flicked his tongue in the air to taste at the angel’s mood. There was uncertainty there. It was sweet, like fresh grapes before they were aged into wine. “You don’t become a demon by being ssssssure of things.”

Aziraphale’s blue eyes widened and there, in the last of the light, they looked deep enough to drown in. Crowley held his breath and waited to see what the angel would do next.

41 AD

In Rome, the angel who had sheltered him, who was receptive to him whenever they met over the course of their days, asked for some of his time. Eventually Crowley would need to report back to Below about what an appalling human Caligula was—and conveniently leave out that it was his very human nature that was responsible for the most appalling parts of him—but he didn’t want to face anything so dark and dirty just yet. He also didn’t want to be alone and was having trouble stomaching humanity at all this evening, so when the angel left he followed.

Oysters turned into a real meal and the real meal turned into desserts and desserts turned into wine and wine turned into more wine which turned Crowley into a quite inebriated figure indeed. He wasn’t new to alcohol of course. In some places it was easier to find beer than water. He wasn’t even really new to drunkeness, considering his original plan for the afternoon had been to steadily drink until he forgot Caligula was a person who existed on this mortal plane at all.

He was new to the gusto with which Aziraphale kept the alcohol coming, along with everything else. Crowley had seen actual bacchanals with sparer spreads and that fact delighted him to no end.

“You are just full of surprises aren’t you?” he asked, as they made their way toward the outer edges of the city.

“What do you mean?”

Aziraphale trailed behind Crowley, a little winded from trying to keep up with his long, sure strides. Or, at least, Crowley hoped they looked sure. He couldn’t quite feel where his legs connected to his hips and that felt surprisingly fine.

“Gluttony is a sin, angel,” Crowley said. The juxtaposition of Aziraphale’s nature and his celestial state of being made him giggle into his own shoulder.

“Of course,” Aziraphale said, burping quietly mid-sentence. "It is."

“And,” Crowley yelped. “You just ate all of the oysters in the the whole of the Tyrrhenian Sea! And washed it down with all of Rome’s wine!”

Aziraphale caught up to Crowley. “Don’t be ridiculous! The punishment for gluttony, as with all sins, is in the consequences, and we won’t have any.”

“None?” He patted his hands against his numb cheeks and down his chest. "I feel consequenced."

It was dark out now. Crowley pulled his glasses down his nose a bit so that he could see over the tops of them in hopes that he might avoid running into anything or anyone that strayed into his very straight, very sober path.

He half wondered what it was like to live as an angel and have a life that could just eschew consequences whenever he wanted. Crowley couldn’t eschew consequences. In order to do that he’d have to eschew himself because, as a demon, he was just one big walking—or more accurately at the moment, unsteadily meandering—consequence.

“What is the point of revelry if it doesn’t touch you?" he asked. "Deep down in your soul I mean.”

“We’re not-” Aziraphale started, then thought better of it and lowered his voice. “We’re not humans. Our souls don’t work that way,” he insisted.

“Might be onto something there,” Crowley said. “I doubt I’ll find my way back to Heaven no matter what I do. What’s one more jug of wine for my wreckage?”

“Never say never.” Aziraphale sighed. "Come on."

Crowley followed him into an alleyway between two quarters of the market. Around them sellers and shoppers were finishing up for the night and heading off in their opposite directions. None of them spared a glance for the two drunk persons disappearing into the shadows.

Aziraphale stopped halfway down the alley and turned to face Crowley. There was barely a foot of distance between them. “Look at me.”

Crowley did as he was asked. He lowered his glasses further and looked Aziraphale over. He took in his short tufting hair, his blue eyes, his soft hands, the way the white robe he wore was pulled across his full chest and cinched near his waist. Aziraphale had modeled himself after a much different strain of human than Crowley had.

He wondered if it was due to their work, if maybe as a demon he just saw more people in distress, or maybe that he only saw them in distress, never a happier aftermath. Aziraphale seemed built for easiness—easy to look at, easy to miss. There were no angles about him to snag a gaze, yet Crowley’s eyes always seemed to get tangled up in him anyway. It was probably for the best that they only saw each other every once in a while, in the grand ineffable scheme of things.

Aziraphale cupped Crowley’s jaw in his hand and brought his gaze back up so they were staring at each other eye to eye. “You just have to concentrate, okay? Think about how you don’t want to feel this way anymore, and you can miracle it away.”

“Don’t do miracles,” Crowley said.

He didn’t see the point of getting drunk just to immediately get rid of the drunkenness. Wasn’t the drunkenness the point? He pulled his head back so that it was no longer in Aziraphale’s hand.

“Wile it away then,” Aziraphale said impatiently. “They’re the same basic function I would think. You just use yours for....” He waved his hand in the air between them.

“Fun?” Crowley asked. He stuck his tongue out at the angel and flicked it perilously close to his nose.

“Evil,” whispered Aziraphale.

“Hmmph,” Crowley disagreed. He leaned back until there was, luckily, a wall to hold him up, and crossed his arms over his chest.

“Suit yourself. I’m not your keeper.” Aziraphale scrunched his nose and squinted his eyes.

Crowley felt the frisson of magic as it flowed out of Aziraphale, taking the drunkenness with it. He had not been this close to an angel’s power in quite some time. It was warm, and it made the hairs on the backs of his arms stand up.

His pleasure in the sensation was interrupted by a disturbance from the end of the alleyway.

“You there,” a large man with broad shoulders and a thick beard shouted. “Stop!”

Crowley fought through the fog of wine to try and think of what he was doing that there was to stop. He and Aziraphale weren’t even touching. This was surely the least exciting liaison to happen in an alleyway in Rome in all of Caligula’s reign. Not that there would be much to go at. Demon bodies were more or less useless in that way unless there was an awful lot of prep work done. He assumed angel bodies were as well.

“I beg your pardon,” Aziraphale started. Then he took a step back and said, “oh.”

A small child sprinted between them. Crowley got his wits about him just in time to note that the child was very thin, very dirty, and holding a stack of bread rounds almost as tall as his torso.

“Oh,” he echoed.

The man started down the alley. Crowley tripped himself and fell into Aziraphale, blocking much of the path. There was a brief tussle as the man tried to force his way around them and Crowley managed to end up exactly in front of him for several attempts.

“So sorry,” Aziraphale said, finally hauling Crowley out of the way. “My friend is drunk you see.”

The man sneered at them. “If I don’t catch that thief I’m coming back for you two!”

Crowley looked Aziraphale in the eye and raised an eyebrow in question. When he got no answer he snapped his fingers. Two heavy clay pots rolled off the roof to their right. The first cracked over the man’s head and the second cracked over the man’s back as he hit the ground in a heap.

“Goodness,” Aziraphale said. “That was distasteful.”

“You would rather I let him manhandle a child?”

Aziraphale put some space between them and studied Crowley for a moment. “Are you okay to walk for a bit more?”

Crowley shrugged, but he followed when Aziraphale started back out into the open night air.

They ended up sitting under a tree together on the outskirts of the city. Aziraphale gracefully lowered himself into the grass and sat with one knee tucked up under his chin, staring out into the countryside. Crowley dropped down inelegantly with his back to Aziraphale and took his glasses off so he could look up at the night sky.

The stars felt so close from here. He remembered being an angel, remembered the color of the stars’ light against his skin as he thoughtfully put them together and hung them out there in the black. He reached a hand up toward them, as if he could catch them if he only stretched a little more.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Aziraphale said finally.

Crowley grunted and dropped his hand back into his lap. “A man that size taking his anger out on a child. A hungry child. He’ll survive. He deserved worse.”

“Seems a bit undemonic, defending the defenseless. Seems like something I should have done.”

“Maybe, but you didn’t.”

Aziraphale did not respond.

Crowley sighed. He was annoyed that an angel was telling him what was and was not demonic. Between the two of them, surely Crowley knew better.

“He’ll still take that anger out on plenty of other people. Plenty more people than would have gotten it if he’d taken his bread back. Just doing my part to add to the haze of dissatisfaction that will eventually lead to general unrest.”

“General unrest,” Aziraphale said thoughtfully.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Crowley said.

“Like what? You can’t even see my face.”

“I can feel it. I can feel your good will. It itches. Cut it out.” He leaned back on his hands and turned to look Aziraphale in the eye.

Aziraphale smiled at him. It made Crowley’s skin crawl in a not altogether unpleasant way. Aziraphale stretched his legs out and leaned back onto his elbows so he could stare up at the sky too. His shoulder brushed Crowley’s arm, moved away, and then came back to rest there. The warmth of him seeped through his robe and into Crowley’s skin. It was like sunning on a rock that had been collecting the day’s heat for thousands of years.

“Are you still drunk?” Aziraphale asked.

“A bit.”

“Okay. Let me know when you sober up. Don’t want to leave you out here all alone in such a vulnerable state.”

“I’m gonna drop a clay pot on you,” Crowley grumbled. But he stretched out onto his back, one arm under his head and one arm pressed against Aziraphale’s, and set to naming the stars one by one from memory.

998 AD

Crowley stood beneath a torch at the edge of the banquet hall and watched the proceedings. He’d been there for hours waiting for things to die down so he could get the strikingly young Otto III alone and have a very serious talk with him about the Italian campaigns, but these useless courtiers never seemed to tire of themselves. Crowley had tired of them hours ago, with their sour breath and braggadocious claims and groping of the castle maids. He was one peal of ugly laughter into a startled young face away from going down to the kitchens and tempting everyone there to start carrying knives on their person.

That was a thought that had the promise of getting this party properly started.

The one saving grace of the evening was that Aziraphale had shown up a short time ago with Gerbert of Aurillac, which gave Crowley an entirely new type of show to watch.

Aziraphale hadn’t noticed yet that Crowley was there. Or if he had he hadn’t thought it worth noting. That second possibility stung, but Crowley knew Aziraphale well enough to know how distracted he could be by a succulent piece of lamb or a well padded bit of jacket. It probably hadn’t occurred to him that letting his attention stray from his current charge would be beneficial. And it wasn’t as if Aziraphale was keeping an eye out for the demon. Crowley would know if he was, because he had been keeping an eye out for Aziraphale for the better part of a thousand years.

Eventually Otto pulled Gerbert aside and shut Aziraphale out, so Aziraphale wandered toward the edges of the party. Crowley thought see me, see me, see me, as hard as he could, but didn’t move from the shadows to help the seeing along.

He wasn’t sure he was actually capable of tempting an angel. He wasn’t sure whether their powers might somehow cancel each other out. Aziraphale moved around the room in several widening circles before he came close to Crowley’s hiding place. He stopped at the edge of the revelries with his back to Crowley.

Crowley figured that was the best opening he’d get, so he pushed away from the wall and quietly slipped up behind Aziraphale.

“Can you feel that?” he asked, lips close to Aziraphale’s ear.

Aziraphale jumped and turned to see who was speaking to him. Crowley watched his eyes light up and then dim again as the angel moved seamlessly from surprise into propriety. That was interesting.

“Feel what?” Aziraphale asked.

“The eleventh century. It’s just out there on the horizon.”

“Of course it is.” Aziraphale furrowed his brow. “That’s how time works.”

Crowley gave a bored sort of laugh. “I’ve never seen an angel with so little sense for the possibility that exists in tomorrow. How do you even manage to get out of your little cloud bed in the morning?”

“Do you see many angels then?” Aziraphale asked stiffly.

Crowley smiled. He couldn’t help himself. “No, no. I try to stay away from them, mostly. What with their usual overwhelming desire to try and smite me on the spot.”

“Well that’s not very sporting,” Aziraphale said.

“I agree. That’s why you’re the only angel for me.”

Aziraphale’s face struggled through a quick succession of expressions that moved from pleased to uneasy and then settled somewhere in the range of vague interest. Crowley hadn’t seen a show this entertaining since Judith cut off that man’s head in his own tent. Never let it be said he brought people anything but what was coming to them.

“So what brings you to the world’s most boring dinner function?”

Aziraphale turned to look back at the ongoing feast. “I don’t know. They’re not so bad.”

“They’re the worst, angel. There’s nothing as tedious as a man convinced of his own cleverness and humor. I would have left hours ago, except that I need to speak to old Otto about trying to take Rome.”

“That doesn’t seem like a very sound plan." Aziraphale wrinkled his nose in distaste.

“Demons don’t do wisdom. That’s your department.”

“Ah, yes.” He pointed across the room to where Otto and Gerbert were still speaking at the head of the main table. “That’s why I’m here you see. Trying to influence the placement of a new pope.”

“What’s happened to the old pope?”

“Nothing yet.”

They watched the men for a moment. Crowley tried to think about anything but how close Aziraphale was standing to him. Just an inch or so to the left and he could have some of that warmth he’d had in Rome. Oh, they’d seen each other since, but only in passing. There was never time for a good old-fashioned liaison these days. Too many growing city-states and countries. Too many wiles to seed into their foundations.

“We have got to stop meeting like this,” Crowley said. What he meant was, we should start meeting casually with more alcohol and fewer humans.

“I know,” Aziraphale agreed, though Crowley couldn’t be sure he meant quite the same thing. “One wonders if one of us couldn’t just handle all of it.”

“Now where have I heard that before?” Crowley stroked his chin and pretended he hadn’t just had his own idea parroted back at him four hundred and fifty years after he’d had it. “I’m not sure you have it in you to wile. What are you going to do, feed possible sinners cured meats until they die?”

“Well, gluttony is a sin after all. Or at least, someone who should know once told me so.” Aziraphale gave Crowley a raised eyebrowed look that Crowley had never seen on an angel before. Very interesting indeed. “And here I was just about to say that I was so certain you could actually do it.”

“Pull a miracle from a temptation? Seems unfair, like it would taint it somehow. Give it a different sort of affect.”

“I already know you have a soft spot for some of them. You’re already doing the work, you just need to apply that leverage on a larger scale. Like when you do your tempting.”

Crowley sighed. Aziraphale’s explanation sounded disturbingly like pity, which he was not interested in receiving from holier than thou assholes. Especially ones he had thought were above that sort of thing. He was very tired all of a sudden.

“I’ll not have you impugning my dishonor this way.” He turned and stalked out of the hall and into the night.

The air in the open courtyard was much less stuffy than it had been in the hall, but it wasn’t pleasant. There was a wetness to it, a misting that hadn’t quite resolved into rain. It reminded him of a time and place from very long ago and made him uncomfortable. Not even an angel wing would keep him dry of this. It was the type of wet that seeped through the cracks in windows and into one’s bones.

There were lit torches along the walls, but they were guttering against the wet and throwing more shadow than light. His boots squelched through the mud. It was an overall miserable night that matched the way he was feeling. He shivered and pulled his jacket more tightly around him.

He thought about leaving and letting things play themselves out the way they would with Otto. He could certainly watch from afar and report back a success on whatever disaster this king got himself into. He might even steal a horse on his way out, just to kick off any feelings of distrust that could lead to poor decisions.

He’d made up his mind and was halfway to the stables when Aziraphale shouted his name. Crowley stopped, but did not turn around. The footsteps coming toward him in the mud sounded uneven. He could just imagine the prissy way in which Aziraphale was avoiding the larger puddles of water.

“Wait,” Aziraphale said when he’d finally come up beside Crowley. “I was being serious. I think we could make this work.”

“It’s almost like you don’t want to see me anymore,” Crowley said. He tried very hard to make it sound like a joke.

Aziraphale paused a beat too long before answering. “Why should I want to see you?”

“My charm and good looks?” Crowley ran a hand through his damp hair. It was sticking to his neck unpleasantly. No matter how this was going to go he wanted to get under cover as soon as he could.

“I value you, you know,” Aziraphale said, voice soft. “You’re one of the few beings on the Earth who I can talk to about,” he gestured to the soggy, dark courtyard as if it was the whole of the world. “All of this. And I don’t just think you want to do good things. I know you already do them.”

“Just shout it to the Heavens, why don’t you? You’re going to get me double damned!”

“I’m not sure that’s possible, but I agree we shouldn’t find out.”

Crowley turned to face him. Aziraphale's hair had quickly become a slick blond nest and water was beading up on his heavy jacket. Crowley remembered the garden, how Aziraphale had tilted his face up to catch that first rain. He wondered when the awe the angel had for all of it had worn off. If Aziraphale might eventually lose interest in him as well.

“Does this mean you want to do bad things?” he asked, just to see how Aziraphale would answer.

Aziraphale pursed his lips. “Not as such, but you had a point back in Wessex, and I’ve been thinking about it a great deal, this last hundred years especially. If anything it would mean I’d have to see you more so we could trade our intelligence. Tying myself to an enemy could be just as bad of an idea for me as it could be for you.”

“Don’t sound so giddy about it,” Crowley said dryly.

It was a very bad and dangerous idea, which was probably why he’d had it in the first place. There were as many ways this could go wrong as there were days yet to come in the future history of the world. Still, he could feel his hope sinking its teeth into the possibility of it nonetheless.

Any sort of arrangement with an angel was sure to be a foolish endeavor, and on its face there was no reason for him to have proposed it. It wasn’t as if he was going to do enough good works to get into Heaven. That was not how being a demon worked—once a demon, always a demon. It wasn’t even that he wanted to get back to Heaven, really. Now that he’d spent time in Hell he could see Heaven for what it was, but that was because he could also see Hell for what it was. Neither of those places felt like somewhere he really belonged.

This damp, chilly courtyard also did not feel like somewhere he belonged, but it felt closer to something like that imaginary place than either of those other planes of existence combined. It was something about the melding of the two sides that really brought a dimension and color to existence. Taking all of this into consideration he was certain of two things. One, that striking this deal with Aziraphale might ensure that the world stayed as lovingly balanced as he liked it to be. Two, that this was going to end in heartbreak. He couldn’t resist.

He held out his hand. “Alright then.”

Aziraphale broke into a wide grin and gripped Crowley’s hand with both of his own. They were clammy and dripping with water just like the rest of him, but they still emanated warmth from underneath it all.

“Oh, wonderful,” he said enthusiastically. “I have to admit, I’m a little worried you’ll turn out to be better at this than I am.”

1100 AD

By the end of the 11th century, Aziraphale had been sent off to some far flung and much colder part of the world that thankfully already had a local demon of its own. This left Crowley free to do his demonic work without distractions, but it also meant that there was a slight power imbalance that made him uncomfortable, so he didn’t relish it too much.

In the year 1100 he received a letter from Aziraphale that carried his first request for Crowley to work a miracle. There was a child in nearby Sponheim who needed to start having visions, and soon, for all the groundwork for the rest of her life to be in place.

Crowley could do visions no problem. Visions were old hat. He was always giving people further insight into some impossible future they were imagining for themselves or, in dire situations, the sorts of torments that might await them if they didn't follow his demonic instructions to the letter. What he was unsure about was what kind of vision one even gave to a child to incite God’s love and power within them. It was probably not the same kind of vision you gave a Duke that would lead to his eventual greedy downfall. He pondered it on his way.

What was it children even wanted? Probably a safe place to sleep, and food, and another person to hold them when they were sick. Crowley had seen many children over the centuries who were wanting of these things, but when he got to his destination, it was clear that his charge was not a daughter of want. She was, however, a child who was sometimes in great pain, and Crowley knew what to do with that. He dressed like a man of low noble rank and introduced himself to the family as a healer.

The pain little Hilde was having was unpredictable, so Crowley got a room at a local inn and waited to be notified that he was needed. He whiled away his time convincing other boarders to play mostly disastrous games of dice with him. He would then give any money he won off them to the philosophy student who was staying for a time in the room next to his.

The student’s name was Pierre le Pallet (though he was thinking of changing it when he began teaching) and the fog of confusion over this impromptu patronage threw off his writing and thinking, which balanced out any true goodwill Crowley might have racked up with these actions. There wasn’t any particular demonic reason for Crowley to be seeding this confusion. He just liked the young man.

With his long dark hair and searching eyes, Pierre reminded Crowley of himself from three thousand years ago in a dark, uncertain way. Especially in his awkward attempts to try and figure out what Crowley wanted to gain from him with these gifts. Crowley didn’t want anything as much as he purely just didn’t need the money. He did however know that men were endless rivers of want, so it was not a surprise to him when Pierre’s assumptions built up until they overflowed the levies and manifested in him inviting himself into Crowley’s room late one evening.

He came to Crowley under the pretense of having a question about modern healing methods for melancholic temperament. Crowley invited Pierre inside the sparsely dressed space with an offer to let him look through some common texts he had. He barely had the door closed before Pierre pressed him up against the inside of it with the full weight of mortal philosophical curiosity.

For all his familiarity with the sorts of things he could get humans to do to each other, Crowley did not have much first hand experience with physical intimacy. He didn’t need it. He certainly didn’t need Pierre’s hands against his shoulders or his wet lips and hot breath against his neck, but there was need and then there was magnanimity and forbearance.

The kiss was not unpleasant. It took Crowley a minute or so to really catch on to the specific way he was meant to participate in the activity, but as with every new earthly skill he learned, when he did figure it out he went at it with gusto. Their mouths were surely the main event, but Crowley was more interested in what Pierre was doing with his hands.

From their start at his shoulders Pierre slid them down Crowley’s chest and then around his waist so he could slip them underneath Crowley’s tunic. One hand spread across his lower back and held his body close to Pierre’s. The other slid up along the route of his spine. The slow drag of skin on skin lit a dull, pleasant ache in his gut. This human was not as warm as Aziraphale, but he was still warmer than Crowley, a fact which Pierre marvelled at after some minutes of kissing had lapsed into loud breathing and quiet contemplation.

“How good of a healer can you be if you have not yet healed yourself of this affliction?” Pierre asked. He took both of Crowley’s hands into his own and rubbed them vigorously to try and warm them.

“Because there is no affliction in me,” Crowley said.

That was almost true. There was nothing afflicting him that could be healed in the way Pierre thought about healing. There was hardly a poultice one could apply to a Fallen being to clean the tarnish away. He wasn’t even sure he would accept one if there was.

Correctly assuming that was all the answer he was likely to get for that query, Pierre moved on to his next curiosity. He let go of Crowley’s hands and rested a finger on the metal arm of Crowley’s dark glasses.

“Why do you wear these?”

"Sensitive to light," Crowley replied.

"It's dark out now." Pierre placed a light kiss to the shell of Crowley's ear and then his cheek just below the inquisitive finger.

“Because I don’t want people to see my eyes," Crowley said, brushing his hand away.

“Why?”

Crowley cupped Pierre’s face in his hands, thinking that if they could stop talking and start kissing again he might be able to keep a small bit of his pride and also keep this young man from losing his mind, which sometimes happened when unsuspecting people found out what he was. He seemed bright. That would be such a waste.

“Because other people don’t want to see my eyes," he said.

He kissed Pierre with an intensity that doubled any Pierre had given him thus far. Startled, Pierre fell away from him. Crowley pressed forward and chased the warmth. Pierre pushed back until Crowley was trapped against the door again. He pressed a knee between Crowley’s thighs. Crowley nipped at his bottom lip to try and distract him from what he might expect to find there.

Pierre rested his hands against the door on either side of Crowley’s head and pulled away from the kiss. “I want to see them.”

“You don’t.”

Pierre stared at him, stubborn.

Crowley lowered his hands and clasped them behind his back. Their position caused his body to arch away from the door and his hips to move further up Pierre’s thigh in a way he hoped would be distracting. It was a pose of some trust, but not true defenselessness. If this went badly he would have the upper hand regardless. It was unlikely this young person could manage to discorporate a demon as old as Crowley all on his own.

“I do,” Pierre breathed.

He reached slowly for the glasses with both hands. Crowley did not make a move to stop him. Pierre slid them off Crowley’s face.

With the glasses removed Crowley watched the naked light of the lantern play on Pierre's face as he looked into eyes that were older than the Earth. Crowley got the sense that he could feel the weight of it, of Crowley’s very existence and what it meant, even if he couldn’t work out exactly where that weight was coming from. Crowley could tell that every piece of philosophical and theological education in Pierre was working to stare these facts down rather than shy away from them like most people did.

“What are you?” Pierre asked.

Crowley stared back at Pierre, unblinking. “What do you think I am?”

“Demon,” Pierre breathed in awe.

Crowley collected his glasses from Pierre's hands and gently pushed him away. He crossed the room and placed the glasses onto the small table under the small window before turning back to where Pierre was still standing, no doubt trying to reconcile any personal beliefs he had with what was right there in front of him. Humans, overall, were very bad at believing things if those things made them uncomfortable, even if there was absolute proof that certain things should be believed.

“You don’t deny it,” Pierre said.

“Would you believe me if I did?” Crowley asked.

“No.”

“Then I will not lie to you." Crowley sat down on the edge of his bed. He crossed one leg over the other and crossed his wrists over his knee, curling up in the face of possible attack out of habit. "It’s a dreadful habit, lying. I try not to if at all possible.”

Pierre took a step forward. “But sometimes you have to.”

Crowley shrugged. “Occupational hazard.”

“You are tempting me," Pierre said, voice uncertain.

His hands started to shake. There was some sort of battle playing itself out in him that Crowley could not overhear and didn't care to really. He knew what humans thought of demons. Some of it was accurate, but some of it was just imaginative. Even the world’s least imaginative human had more imagination than the average demon. As far as Crowley could tell, he was the only exception in that department.

“I’m not the one who invited myself into your room this evening. Perhaps it is you who are tempting me. How do I know you’re not a demon?”

This pulled Pierre up quick. He shifted his weight. “Do I look like a demon?”

“You don’t look unlike a demon. A demon can look like anyone, that’s the point of us. Some of us anyway.”

Pierre stood quietly in front of Crowley’s doorway for several moments, finishing off the fight he was having with himself. Then he took a hesitant step toward the bed, and another. He reached out and placed his thumb on Crowley’s cheek, stroking it lightly.

Crowley did not move, did not want to have anything he did mistaken for temptation or coercion. That power shift would take the curious pleasure out of this entirely. Pierre sank down onto the bed next to him and placed a hand over Crowley's.

When the next kiss came it was a kiss of acceptance and absolute knowledge. Crowley returned the intensity of it. He brought his hands up to card his fingers through Pierre's hair and ease himself into the feeling of liking to be touched like this. Pierre anchored himself to Crowley. One hand slid from his knee down across his body to his hip and the other one became pinned between them at his waist. After a few more minutes the hand on Crowley's hip began to slide down his thigh and up into his lap.

Crowley removed a hand from the softness of Pierre's hair and grabbed his wrist to stop him from exploring further. Not only had he not been prepared for this to go further, he didn't think he wanted it to. Certainly not in the same way this young man did. Kissing and closeness were all well and good, but he was not in the mood for frenzy. Besides, he was here for a purpose.

As if the universe had sensed the cue, heavy footsteps came up the stairs and then a rapid knock landed on his door.

"We need the healer," a deep voice called out. "The girl has fallen ill!"

"I'll be out in a moment!" Crowley shouted in response. "Keep the horses ready!"

The footsteps retreated down the stairs again and disappeared as quickly as they had come. Crowley disentangled himself from Pierre and stood. He set about gathering the small amount of things he'd brought with him. Pierre sat sprawled out on the bed, red lipped and mussed, and watched.

"You're not going to hurt anyone are you?" he asked.

"Not this time," Crowley said. He put on his glasses.

"You're not coming back tonight, are you?"

"Probably not."

"Thank you, then," Pierre said.

Crowley scowled. "For what?"

"For letting me touch something God touched."

Crowley had not expected that to be the answer. He wasn't sure how to respond to it. No one had ever thanked him for happening to them before. Aziraphale was the only other being on the planet who even cared that he continued to exist at all. He made a decision and let the world wrap itself around it.

"I have this room for another fortnight or so and I won't be needing it. You should take it, stop paying for the other one."

"So you'll know where to find me?"

"Sure," Crowley said, even though he was certain he would never seek this young man out again. There was little more truly demonic than false hope.

He bent down to kiss Pierre one last time and then left without looking back.

When he made it to the house the child was inconsolable. She sobbed and cried out because of the pain exploding in her head and against the backs of her eyes. Crowley set to work ordering people about like he knew what he was doing and then stationed himself by the girl’s bedside with a small bowl of cold water and some strips of cloth. The cold water would do nothing for her, but it would disguise the chill of his touch and he needed an excuse to get his hands over her eyes.

Normally, he would have just projected the vision in front of her and coaxed her eyes open, but there were other people present because of the rather sensible desire to not leave a child alone with a strange man, so he had to do it the invasive way and project it into her thoughts. He really hated doing things the invasive way.

Crowley still wasn’t sure he was capable of the thing Aziraphale had asked him to do. He was no longer a being of light, no longer blessed in a way he could pass on. He had made certain things turn out okay for certain people of course, but always in a way that caused consequences for others. There was a very important part of what he did that involved plausible deniability of any incidental good works, but this….

If he could do this, if he could create light from the darkness inside of him, it would be nothing short of theft. He did think theft in general was probably meant to be a rather demonic thing to do, but there had to be some sort of safeguard on the well of holiness in the world, didn’t there? There had to be some way to keep beings like him from getting their dirty hands all over it and tarnishing what was there.

Still, he had made a promise to an angel, and maybe that counted for something in the grand ineffable scheme of things. Crowley pulled all the remnants of warmth Pierre had left on him, as well as some light from the candles in the room, and got to work trying to meld them into one source of heat and light. He thought about what he wanted Hilde to see and built the scene up piece by piece, painting it in behind her retinas.

The vision was this. It was an area of lush German greenness that would feel like home to her. Sheep ambled in the rolling fields and bird song rang out over the tops of the trees. Some distance on from the center of the vision a monastic complex of grey stone buildings rose up out of the green. The sky above the field rapidly changed from the blue of a midday in the spring to the golden of a summer sunset. The color spilled and changed in the sinewy way that blood spread through water. As the last of the blue disappeared a white dove took flight from the tallest tower. It swooped down just in front of Hilde’s vision and dropped an olive leaf at her feet in much the same way a different dove had dropped one at Noah’s feet all those years ago.

Hilde probably wouldn’t be familiar with the story now, but as she grew and got a more complete religious education the images would come back to her as if from a dream. He made the bird song as sweet as he could, the grass as soft. This was the first of many things she would see in fits of pain throughout her life. He wanted her to believe that beauty could be culled from pain. In certain circumstances, anyway.

Eventually the crying quieted down and her chest stopped heaving. The mother breathed a ragged sigh of giddy relief and ran off to find her husband. Crowley pulled the wet strips away from the girl’s eyes and brushed her fine hair away from her face. He remembered other children following along a dusty plain as they skipped, jumped, and ran after a train of increasingly impossible animals. He remembered the rain starting to fall and the animals getting a reprieve that the children did not.

A sudden sharp pick of anger stabbed through his chest. Why should he be the one to bring defenseless children to a God who had no interest in defending children? To a God who had cast him out without a second glance? For what? For wanting to understand?

But he hadn’t done it for God, of course. He had done it for Aziraphale. He had done it for their secret partnership, because knowing one person who was on the opposite side of the same fight was better than knowing no one. Because it didn’t matter how many thoughtful young people he let invade his space, none of them would understand the way Aziraphale could.

Crowley didn’t like to be alone. He didn’t like to be hemmed in and entirely too close to everyone the way he was in Hell, but he also didn’t like to have too much space. There was too much possibility in empty space, too much that could be suddenly taken away from him. He had teased Aziraphale for not recognizing all the things a tomorrow could be, but that was because he never stopped recognizing it. Too many things could happen from one minute to the next and he needed to know that there was someone else in the world who would listen when he told them that.

It was close to sun up when he left the house. He was more exhausted than he had been in a century and his head was buzzing with the last twelve hours. He wanted to tell someone about it. He thought about going back to the inn to crawl into his now occupied bed there and let whatever might happen happen.

He thought about Aziraphale somewhere cold and foreign to him. How he would no doubt coax a friendly face out of anyone he met, because that was just what Aziraphale did. It was what he had done to Crowley and he hadn’t even been trying. He thought about Pierre. He thought about Aziraphale.

He looked up at the sky. The grey was being slowly burnt away by the approaching fire of dawn. The morning star was a prick of pure, welling promise near the horizon.

“I know You’re still watching,” he said to no one in particular. “Maybe Hell can’t see everything, and maybe whoever You left in charge up there can’t either, but I know You can. What am I meant to do with all of this?”

There was no answer.

He turned his horse around and headed for Lorraine. He would wait until he got there to decide what to do next.

Before

Calling the Fall a Fall was an oversimplification of the whole process. It was not as if every angel who rebelled had simply been taken to a cliff and tossed over the edge. A great many of the Fallen may have preferred that. At least a being knew where they stood with a cliff, and that was either above it or not at all.

The winds did rush by. The planes of the Divine universe as they knew them did slip through the Fallen in a startling streak. Colors blended into one hodge podge of midnight grey with flashes of a light so bright it didn’t exist in any color even Divine eyes could see. There were whispers about The Light. That it was Them. They. The ultimate All watching Their judgment be exacted on the wretched and disconsolate.

But while time and space moved through the Fallen, the Fallen did not move through time or space. When it was all over they were exactly where they had been and they looked much like they had looked. They were just insubstantial to the home they had known.

This new place, this ghost plane, existed with and underneath the Divine plane in the way a bright bowl of flowers may be painted over a canvas already covered in the works of Hieronymus Bosch. If you looked hard enough you could see shadows of the first painting peeking through the second, but you needed special equipment to really study the original.

It wasn't until later that a separate plane was built for the purpose of handling unworthy human souls and housing the unworthy Fallen. In the meantime it was a slow evolution from angel to demon. They were cut off from God’s light. They were ghosts in the only place they had ever belonged, held outside of the halls of grace and acceptance, able only to look in through the invisible walls and remember the warmth they had lost.

They learned the ache of longing and desire and want. They learned what it was to have to remake themselves, to have to start over with only the atoms contained in them as a blueprint. Most importantly they learned that no matter who they had been, they could become anything. So many of them did.

Crowley remembered every part of his transformation. Angels had perfect memories after all, and demons were just angels that had been put in the outside closet until the esteemed company went away. Unfortunately, Earth’s esteemed company planned to stay for a very long time.

Crowley remembered going cold first. There had not been a need to think about temperature in Heaven. Every angel was made with light and carried their own holy fire. But the fire of the Fallen guttered out when cut off from the source and the in between plane had been made of nothingness and mist. There were only the other Fallen to warm themselves by and soon every last drop of heat had dissipated away.

When Hell came it was dark and everything was close and wet. The chill of it seeped into his body and bones, wound its way around the place where his flame had been and took root. The muggy heat of Hell would come later, but even then it would not be the comforting kind of warmth. A fire popping with the fats of a tortured soul was not exactly the pure, life giving heat that had come from his proximity to God.

In Hell, what was left of Crowley’s Divine glow turned to ash on his skin. He developed scales as armor where some demons developed fur and others feathers. He longed to be back among the stars, and in a cruel tilt of the universe his eyes became golden as a symbol of his insubordinate hope. He prostrated when he was told to and rarely got back up. What was the point?

The demon Crowley did not Fall. That had been another being with another name altogether. Someone with a head full of questions. Someone who had not known fear. Now his head was full of both questions and fear and, in spite of how the other demons treated him, he never stopped looking up.

1180 AD

In 1180 Crowley was in Constantinople.

He hadn’t had the chance to speak to Aziraphale in thirty years, but a letter from the angel found him anyway. It let him know of little Hilde’s death because, he said, he thought Crowley might want to know that the first recipient of blessed light from a demon had lived a long and pious life. Nothing Crowley had done had marked her out as ‘sullied’ which meant that Crowley himself must not be ‘too ruined.’

It was worded as a flippant observation, but Crowley knew what he was saying and knew exactly which conversation it was in response to. Those were the words Crowley had used when he finally got the chance to talk to Aziraphale about the vision some ten years after the miracle had been carried out. Hilde had been fine then. Already ensconced in a Benedictine Monastery and living the ascetic life expected of her.

That didn't mean trouble couldn’t still manifest. That his touch hadn’t made her more visible to other demons or dark actors or, even worse, made it so that angels wouldn't come to her. Aziraphale had tried to reassure him at the time and now here was the final proof. Crowley could touch things that were holy and they would remain holy. He wasn't quite sure how he felt about that in total, but the most immediate feeling was one of relief.

The letter went on to explain a laundry list of inconsequential things: food, clothing, choral arrangements, books Aziraphale had read. Crowley could almost see the way Aziraphale’s eyes would light up when talking about each of them. The last thing was a separate piece of paper with a verse written on it in Aziraphale’s cramped calligraphy. It was a poem attributed to Hildegard von Bingen:

O glistening starlight,

O most brilliant singular figure

of the royal marriage,

O glowing gem:

You are arrayed as a person of high rank

who has no mark nor wrinkle;

You are also an angel’s companion

and a citizen of sacredness.

Run, flee from the ancient destroyer’s cave!

Come, enter into the palace of the King.

On the back of the slip in a looser hand Aziraphale had written: That’s a pretty accurate sketch of you! With faith, A.

1510 AD

Florence was a city of sometimes overwhelming color and sound. There was a certain level of deception there of course, tarnish that was being camouflaged by the flourish. Crowley would know that even if he hadn’t spent the last fifteen years sticking his head into dark places. That was just the way it was with humans. But still, they’d all seen the end of Savonarola and that had been a boon to his spirits for well over a decade now. After living for too long with the ever present terror and threat of a God who might actually be paying attention, he and the city were just getting on with things.

Officially he was currently keeping an eye on Niccolo Machievelli, but mostly he took trips to Rome to help Michelangelo drink and complain about that blasted ceiling and then returned to watch Leonardo DaVinci cut up cadavers in his spare time. Humans were fascinating all the way through, it seemed. So many tiny pieces that fit together so intricately. Like clocks, just ticking down from day one.

Demons were mostly ichor and gristle on the inside, from what he had seen in the war. Angels mostly porcelain and light. It didn’t really make sense that there would be a difference. Crowley had been an angel and now he was not.

The bodies of demons had the same frailties as the bodies of angels. You could crack them open in the same ways. But he had seen other demons torn open and watched the smoke and pitch pour out. Likewise with the angels and their dust and light. Who was he to argue with practical experience? Practical experience was the one thing he usually didn’t argue with. Usually.

At what point had his insides had the Divine smoked out of them? Had it been immediately upon Her decision that he did not belong? When the holy fire at the core of him had guttered out? Or had it been gradually coming on even as the fire still blazed, starting from his first transgression? What had that been? Had there been a point when he could have corrected the balance?

This was his problem. Existence presented a person with endless questions. He couldn’t just not ask them. Why make a designation for the question separate from that of an exclamation or calm statement of fact if it wasn’t meant to be noted? What was the point of acknowledging a life if one wasn’t also going to acknowledge the vagaries and finalities and hopes?

Why put fruit you didn’t want eaten so close to grasping hands?

“Where are you?” Aziraphale asked.

Crowley snapped back to the moment he was in.

Aziraphale sat across the table from him in Crowley’s rented rooms. The table was littered with ledgers and empty bottles of wine and the breads and sweets Aziraphale had brought as a small offering. The sun was on its way down. It filled the room with yellowed light and made Aziraphale’s close cut crown of light blond hair and the clean white lines of his chemise—which he had stripped down to because of the heat—glow.

At this moment Aziraphale looked more like a being of porcelain and light than Crowley had ever seen him look. It was distracting, which was what had started Crowley down his previous train of thought. Well, that and the wine. Part of Aziraphale’s shoulder was showing. Why put fruit you didn’t want eaten so close to grasping hands indeed.

Crowley, who had been wearing his hair longer of late, tucked a stray curl of it behind his ear. He shifted in his seat, crossed his legs, let the skirts he wore shift like the water they were patterned after and fall into place around his bare feet. Aziraphale watched him closely and it made him feel stuck somewhere between wanting to perform and not needing to.

Aziraphale didn’t care what he looked like. Aziraphale never cared. He only cared that Crowley wasn’t in distress and that Hell was not gaining ground over Heaven. Sometimes he got both.

“I’m right here,” Crowley grumbled.

He was irritable with the heat and the rote recounting of shared deeds. For a being who spent a lot of time seeking the warmth of others, he sure did hate a muggy afternoon. Not all heat had been created equal. There were some fires he’d left unattended back in Hell that could vouch for that.

Aziraphale looked him over. His face was folded into a frown of concern and Crowley hated that too. He hated that Aziraphale felt protective of him, as if he wasn’t a demon who had survived the Fall and the war and the pit and could take care of himself. Crowley had survived in Hell, he would surely survive Italy and the sixteenth century.

He also hated how kind Aziraphale was. He hated how patient the angel would be with him in spite of his mood or his distraction. He hated that there was a traitorous part of him that wanted every part of this, that still felt connected to the God who had cast him out for being who She’d made him, just because one angel sometimes deigned to smile in his direction. And, oh.

It was one thing to want to be attached to a solitary angel for specific reasons. It was another to think that he might still want to be connected to all of it. Crowley was suddenly very dizzy. He closed his eyes and lowered his head to rest it against his arm on the table.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m just...very tired this century.”

“That’s because you spend all of your time out carousing with artists.” Aziraphale sniffed in distaste.

“Sometimes I carouse with politicians.”

“My dear,” Aziraphale said, voice soft and curled in at the edges.

There was a whole paragraph in those two words. Crowley hated that he knew that too, except he didn’t. It had been over five hundred years since they shook on The Arrangement and in all practical ways, Crowley’s life wasn’t much different than it had been before. Except for how it was, by virtue of all the extra miracle related doubt and fear he carried with him now.

There was something growing in the ichor in him. Something new and hot and worthy of protecting. Something the other demons would kill him for, just for the chance to crack him open and study it. Like DaVinci with his cadavers. He could feel whatever it was blooming inside of him and he was terrified of it.

He felt like at one point, when he had been freshly Fallen and newly broken, he had been sharp and dangerous to be near. Now he wasn’t anymore. Not to any celestial beings. He didn’t know whether to blame himself or his proximity to Aziraphale, or whether it even mattered.

Was it possible, he wondered, to lose faith twice? Or, more terrifyingly, was he growing his faith back?

“Yeah, yeah.” Crowley sat up again and rubbed his hands over his face. He leaned in and stole some honeyed almonds from near Aziraphale’s elbow. “How did the thing in France go?”

“Oh, it was dreadful,” Aziraphale said. “They burned the poor girl at the stake.” He poured himself some more wine and then reached over and topped off Crowley’s cup as well.

“Hard to make a martyr without spilling any blood,” Crowley said grimly. He took up the cup and drank from it deeply.

Aziraphale pursed his lips. “It’s enough to make me wonder if it’s not partially my fault.”

Crowley raised an eyebrow and popped an almond into his mouth.

“Well, the sword,” Aziraphale said. He worried with the hem of his sleeve, rolling it up his arm and then unrolling it again over and over. “And the whole putting ideas in their heads.”

“That definitely doesn’t help, I don’t think,” Crowley said. “It’s one thing to show someone a fire. It’s another to insinuate that they might have eternal life, love, and glory if they would only set a whole opposing army on fire. It’s enough to make one stop and think about what it is they’re really supposed to be opposing.”

“The infernal forces!”

Aziraphale almost sounded like he was still convinced of it, but Crowley had been watching Aziraphale just as intently as Aziraphale had been watching him. He’d seen the furniture move around in his mind on several occasions. He thought it was probably only a matter of time before they started truly agreeing on things. Crowley felt the anticipation of it spread in the same way he could sometimes feel Aziraphale's magic in the air.

He ate another almond. They were very nice. He had never been as interested in anything as much as Aziraphale was interested in some foods, but these had a layered sweetness a demon could get into.

“Infernal forces? And how are you planning on opposing me today? Drinking the last of the wine?”

“Now that you mention it.” Aziraphale upended the dregs of the last bottle into his cup and mocked Crowley by smiling and giving a small salute with it.

“Bastard,” Crowley said, and swiped the rest of the almonds. They were sticky in the palm of his hand. He shook them out onto the table in front of him.

Aziraphale gave him a dejected pout. “An eye for an eye…”

“Will both taste equally as delicious, I think.” Crowley popped another almond into his mouth.

“Well certainly if you dip anything in enough honey.” Aziraphale wrinkled his nose and drank down the end of the wine.

“Really though, don’t you ever think about stepping away from this? Why is it our job to pull them one way or another? They seem to do a quite confounding job of that well enough on their own. Think of all the things we could see if we didn’t have to bounce all over the place paying attention to the minutiae.”

“For the thousandth time,” Aziraphale said, in a voice that was meant to call up the idea of patience, but not actually show any. “It’s why we were made. To love them. And to shepherd them.”

“Why you were made, maybe,” Crowley said.

“Yes, we all know that you, instead of being made to sway the count one way or another vis-a-vis human souls, were made to vex me personally.”

Crowley dropped his elbows onto the table and rested his chin in his hands. He grinned with as many teeth as he could. “The ineffable jusssssst works in the funniessst ways.”

“Is that the face you make when you’re out tempting? It’s a wonder you get any wiles performed at all.”

“I’m wounded.” Crowley tilted his head and batted his eyelashes. “Positively destroyed that you don’t find me tempting.” He pouted.

“Foul,” Aziraphale said, in the voice of someone who was admonishing a bird for pecking at grain even though they knew the bird couldn’t help itself. “Despicable demon.” He reached across the table, placed his sticky fingers against Crowley’s forehead, and shoved Crowley’s face backward out of his hands.

Crowley stretched and slumped back in his chair, laughing. “Some of them are quite easy to love. Sometimes. In spite of themselves. Makes a demon feel like maybe there’s hope after all.”

That made Aziraphale sit up straight.

Outside the yellow had seeped out of the sunset and the sky had gone dark reds and purples. The light no longer made him glow. He had been returned to the everyday state of common existence in which Crowley felt he himself always lived. There were no romantic rays of light spared for demons, not even if they attempted to summon them. No, the light that reflected from demons had an altogether different, flickering quality. Even in these bodies it was, he thought, rather easy to tell the two groups apart, and a wonder that so many humans didn’t know how to do it.

“I didn’t,” Aziraphale started. “I’m very sorry. This is going to sound horrible. I didn’t know demons could, well, love.”

“Yet you sent me to do miracles for you.” Crowley said.

Yet you sit across from me frequently and watch me just as I watch you, he thought. He tried not to let this admission from Aziraphale sting. He tried to squash the helpless frustration that rose in his throat as he thought about all of the time they spent together. How could one situation be read so many different ways with only two people involved?

“No, I mean. I knew you could do that. I knew you were interested in them. That you could become invested. That you had used your power to help some of them. I saw it happen. I just didn’t know what emotion that was manifesting from. There are quite a few, you know.”

“I do. I have quite a few emotions myself. Sometimes even more than one at a time.” Crowley sighed. “Of course demons love. Angels love, and the first lovers were cast out. Or murdered. You remember that thing with Saraquael."

Aziraphale turned his head away abruptly and looked out the window. Crowley had struck a nerve. The sunset tinted his cheeks red and gave him an air of embarrassment or shame.

"That was different."

"How?"

"Carasel, they, they wanted too much. From Saraquael and from love."

"What do you think love is, angel?"

Love is, by definition, too much, he thought in answer to his own question.

It was the first of a hundred questions at the tip of Crowley’s tongue. Aziraphale loved, but did not think Crowley could love? Aziraphale believed in Crowley, trusted him, shared parts of his life with him, made himself vulnerable. Crowley did all of those same things in return, but Crowley knew he was doing them out of love. He knew he was a lost cause and had known since the two of them had stood elbow to elbow on that damned wall. He had been working under the assumption that this angel who loved the humans also loved him, because why wouldn’t he? Why would he behave the way he did if he didn’t?

Aziraphale, it seemed, was working under different assumptions.

“I think there are certain kinds of it best left to the humans.”

He turned his face back to Crowley. His eyes were wet. He wasn’t looking at Crowley but through him as he remembered an incident that had shocked the whole of the host and apparently still scared Aziraphale to his core. Every line of his body was drawn taut and was screaming at Crowley to stop this line of discussion. Aziraphale looked like he was about to fold in on himself, like he wanted to beg off the danger of the topic entirely.

Crowley obliged, brought the conversation back home. "It’s not an abuse of power, or me giving myself over to my nature, if that’s what you’re worried about. I mean, I have dallied. A bit, because one must kill the time somehow, but I never start it.”

“People just have an incorrigible need to touch you, do they?” Aziraphale’s voice was strangely flat.

Crowley had done something wrong, he just didn’t know what. “Not most of them, no. But sometimes.” He shrugged. “You know how it is. One minute you’re having a quiet evening in, planning out your next dastardly deeds, and the next minute some young person has invited themselves into your room for ah, intercourse.”

“A grand debate then,” Aziraphale said.

“A velitation even, if you’re not careful.”

Aziraphale gave him a tight smile.

Ah, Crowley thought. “I guess we’ve both learned a new thing this evening. You learned that I am capable of love and I learned that you are very easy to make jealous.”

“I’m not!” Aziraphale pushed his chair back roughly and almost tipped himself out of it.

Crowley waved a hand in the air. “Stop. It’s fine. We’re too long lived for this. I’m not here to judge you. You shouldn’t be here to judge me. That’s Her job, right? And already done at that. You not judging me is the one thing about this thing we have that’s superior to all other er, things.”

“Yes, of course.” Aziraphale started stacking the books and ledgers he’d brought with him. “Superior to all of my other partnerships with demons.” He stood and stalked around the room, collecting the pieces of his wardrobe back to him.

Crowley sat very still and watched Aziraphale bluster about the room for a few minutes. He struggled some with his overcoat in his haste. Once he’d finally gotten everything together he returned to the table to collect his books. Crowley stood with deliberate, telegraphed movement. He ran his hands through his hair and pulled all of it over his left shoulder. Then he reached out and grabbed onto Aziraphale’s sleeve.

Aziraphale paused and looked down to where Crowley had a grasp of him. He did not move. He held his breath.

“I hope you will forgive me,” Crowley began. He took a breath to steady himself. “For treading in the domain of angels.”

He leaned in to place a kiss on Aziraphale’s cheek, the way he had many times with other acquaintances recently. Aziraphale turned his head at the last moment and Crowley’s lips landed softly against his. He let out a surprised breath into Crowley’s mouth and the warmth of him blew into Crowley’s chest. It was such a startling and invasive warmth that Crowley didn’t know what to do. He let go of Aziraphale, stunned, and took several steps backward.

Aziraphale stared at Crowley for some long seconds, then he reached to cup Crowley’s cheek with his hand. Crowley turned his face into Aziraphale’s palm, chasing more of the warmth of him. He inhaled the scent of the honey from the almonds and the salt of Aziraphale’s skin. He kept himself from kissing the skin close to his lips, but it was a very near thing.

It wasn’t that they never touched. They had been working together for thousands of years and become quite comfortable with each other along the way. Which was to say they touched all of the time when they were together, but those were everyday touches. A brush of shoulders, a guiding hand at the small of a back, overlapping fingers when cups or food or books were passed, playful shoves or smacks, falling together when drunk. This was different. It was deliberate, intimate. It was an apology, and it was so close to the sort of attention that Crowley desired to have from Aziraphale that he ached with it.

“I can’t forgive you for Her,” Aziraphale said. “But you do not need forgiveness from me.”

Some small part of Crowley hoped that Aziraphale would pull him in and kiss him back—they could make a pleasant evening of it like he had with humans from time to time—but the angel only rubbed his thumb across Crowley’s cheek and nose a few times before he let him go, took up his books, and head for the door. He let himself out.

Crowley stood for a long time in the middle of the darkened room as Aziraphale’s warmth spread throughout his chest and dissipated into his limbs. It made his hands tingle. He brought one of them up in front of his face and was shocked to find his palm had a golden sheen, as if the warmth was escaping him through his pores. It might have been left over from the almonds, a residue of sugar and honey catching the faintest glow of remaining light. Crowley knew that was impossible, that there wasn’t enough light outside of him to cause it. But the alternative, the idea that the light was inside of him somehow, felt even more impossible.

1760 AD

Lucifer had been a bringer of light, in his own way. One got the feeling in the old days that God had big plans for him, but then he was cast out like a streak of lightning and a whole host of falling stars followed after him. Crowley had been one of those stars, burning through the atmosphere and then free falling into darkness.

The Fallen lost their light somewhere above the clouds where it got tangled up with the hope inherent in a blue sky. They found themselves extinguished and the agony of that emptiness would be the start of all their pain and nastiness to come.

It was possible of course that that had been God’s big plan for Lucifer and the rest of them all along, that they were destined to commit the actions that brought them low and pulled the world taut between Heaven and Hell like a disk spinning between strings in a child’s hands. Black stripes and white stripes blending into an early morning grey. The kind of dreary morning where Venus did not rise ahead of the dawn.

Lamps burned. Papers burned. Homes burned. Forests burned. There were so many destructive ways for someone to bring light.

Crowley was stood at the edge of a battlefield, bathed in moonlight and blood and looking down at his own hands, when he decided he was done making these decisions. Süptitzer Höhen ran red and black with the drying blood of both the Prussians and the Austrians. Probably the humans would decide on a victor for this battle. He didn’t envy them that decision. It seemed like an impossible task. The real victors, of course, would be the coffers of Heaven and Hell as they counted this currency against each other’s accounts.

Officially he would have to find some way to take credit for this, to explain why he was here. Unofficially, he had come here on Aziraphale’s request to save one inconsequential man from the slaughter. There would be a ripple effect with an eventual positive outcome. Two hundred years from now a family would be rejoined, love would grow around them, the world would heal by one wound. One wound which ran red and black with the drying blood of hundreds. Thousands. Millions.

It was impossible to tally the cost of human life on any given day. There were too many humans now. There were what, ten million, twenty million demons? There were close to a billion humans. There would be more and more on the way. Hell couldn’t keep doing things the old ways and pick them off or hold them up to scrutinize one at a time. It was all destined to get drowned out in the noise.

A memory rose up from somewhere deep within him: a small boy stealing bread, a brute he didn’t have patience for, an angel sitting next to him under a tree. General unrest. It was a joke that only someone who would live beyond this horror could tell. Fine then. He would make himself a joker. He would make Aziraphale one with him if he could. This was God’s war on good sense, not theirs. Love them, God had commanded, and then bid them destroyed.

Crowley looked up at the night sky. The stars were blinding.

“Did you even think of the consequences?” he shouted. “Did you think of the ones who loved like you said? Of their pain?!”

There was no answer. There was never an answer.

Let the devil be in the details and the grace in the broad strokes, then. For once he wanted to touch something with hands still stained in light.

1817 AD

In the early 1800s Crowley finally broke down and established a proper home base. He’d been in London for almost twenty years, except for when he had to take small trips far and wide for work, which was longer than he’d ever been anywhere for one stretch. He had not chosen London because Aziraphale had chosen London, but if they were both going to settle it made sense to stay close. For The Arangement’s sake, and also for a list of other reasons he refused to think too hard about, just in case his colleagues from Below had developed telepathy.

He had also designed an ingenious way to keep having things to file on his infernal paperwork without having to get his hands literally bloody. Oh, sometimes they still got dirty, but that was a different thing altogether. It was all in a dishonest day’s work if a demon had to divert the laying of train tracks or arrange for the shout of fire in a theater. The more people who were affected by his schemes the better, because that meant they would spread their dented feelings on to more people who would in turn pay that forward until everyone in the greater London area had been unknowingly touched

Humans had only gotten more set in their ways over the years. The more wealth and stability an area could accumulate the more stubborn the residents became. They were constantly developing new things to make their lives varying degrees of easier and harder, to be sure, but all in all they just wanted to wake up at a regular time and not have to think about anything they were going to do until they got back into bed in the evening. Even then their only thought was about whether or not all of the lamps had been turned out.

Crowley could relate, which is why he took such joy in interfering with that any way he could.

Just that afternoon he had loudly spoiled the plot of the final Jane Austen novel and also the fact that she had been the author of several other works, both pieces of information which were not due to be printed for another three months, in a busy street near Aziraphale’s shop. The disgusted looks he’d gotten had put such a spring in his step that he very nearly skipped into the graveyard that evening to meet with Hastur and Ligur for his monthly check in.

The spring was very quickly knocked from his step when he rounded a corner to find not Hastur and Ligur lurking, but Dagon leaning against the corner of a mausoleum. He pulled up short, mentally shouting the words ‘don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic ’ to himself, and waited for them to notice him.

It didn’t take long before Dagon’s nostrils widened and they tilted their head up to look him over. “Demon Crowley,” they said. “Why do you smell like that?”

“Like what?” Crowley asked.

“Like,” they paused to sniff again. “Like ozone and sanctimonious intent.”

“New cologne perhaps,” Crowley said.

He had been near Aziraphale’s shop today, but he had not been inside of it. He made it a point never to visit the bookshop if he was going to meet with other demons for just this reason. A demon, especially one ranked as highly as Dagon, could smell an angel at a mile as the damned flew, and Crowley did not want them sniffing around and deciding that something needed to be done about London’s local benevolent being.

He drew a line on his mental map of London that was farther away from the bookshop and wrote STAY OUT over it in big red letters, as a reminder for later.

“Perhaps,”Dagon said.

“To what do I owe the pleasure, Lord?” Crowley asked.

“We’ve been keeping an eye on you, Crowley.”

The thought made Crowley nauseous. He didn’t think it showed. Even if it did, that was common from lower level demons when confronted with a being of higher rank. Went back to traditions of prostration that had not been observed in Hell for thousands of years, but because they were hardwired in it was difficult not to feel the urge to bend a knee, or hack up a lung. Crowley shuddered to think what it would be like if he ever encountered Satan.

“Your methods have been...unorthodox for the last decade or so and the Prince Beelzebub has noticed. We are frankly, baffled by the change, but we cannot prove that you are ineffective. We want to better understand your initiative to see if you should be lauded or left in your own pit with no way out.”

“I would certainly prefer the former, if it’s all the same to you.”

Dagon pushed away from the mausoleum and ambled across the grass to where Crowley stood. The insects that flitted above the graves all fell to the ground as they passed by. The scales across their face glinted silver in the moonlight. They smelled of the docks on a hot afternoon when the entrails had not been properly washed back into the water. It was a wonder they could have gotten even a whiff of what Aziraphale might smell like over their own malodorousness.

“Your preference has been noted,” they said. Dagon looked him up and down, sneering. “I think you have been here for too long, that you’ve gone soft, but you have a certain amount of accumulated ill will that cannot be ignored. Still, I’m recommending you for a special project. Maybe some fresh blood in the air will clean the stench of Heaven from your wings.”

“I, I do not know how you think I could possibly smell anything like-” he stammered.

“Await our instructions,” Dagon said. They blinked out, leaving him alone in the cemetery with the dead, the shadows, and the remaining insects.

Crowley walked around the mausoleum to make sure he was alone. When he’d returned to his original position he looked up at the sky, pointed one shaking finger at the stars, and shouted, “Fuck!”

1832 AD

Crowley could not get the scent of blood out of his nostrils or off his tongue.

He had been sent to incite a battle knowing that most of those who would be murdered did not deserve this, knowing that he was being watched closely by his own possible slaughter. He had done his job. Now that it was over he had come clear across the ocean, thousands of miles, right back to the Soho bookshop that was his touchstone. He was afraid to walk inside because he could not get the scent of blood out of his nostrils or off his tongue.

He didn’t want to associate this horror with a place of safety. He didn’t want to ruin this, but he didn’t want to be alone and he didn't know what else to do.

Aziraphale noticed him standing on the stoop before he got up the courage to knock. The angel opened the door and took one good look at him before he flipped the sign on it to CLOSED and ushered him inside.

I shouldn’t be here, Crowley thought, remembering the map in his head that he’d edited fifteen years earlier. They were watching him. He had not reported back yet. They would come to find him. He would smell like Heaven, his own small piece of Heaven.

“Dearest,” Aziraphale said. He pulled on Crowley’s hand and led him to the back room. “What has happened?”

Crowley blinked at him. He looked down at their hands. He looked at the worn couch, the blanket over Aziraphale’s chair, the clutter on the desk, back to his hand which Aziraphale had turned loose. He was still wearing what he had been wearing in America, the dark blue coat covered in dust, the pale trousers caked with river mud. He blinked and put himself back in all black: boots, tighter trousers, tailored shirtsleeves. It was too informal for visiting. It felt too formal for the back room of the bookshop.

Aziraphale gently pushed against Crowley’s shoulders, guided him back until he could fall onto the couch.

“What do you need?” he asked.

It was such a simple question. It had a simple answer, surely. Tea, wine, whiskey, vodka maybe, absinth? None of it would strip him away the way he needed to be stripped. None of it would cleanse him. Was it even possible for a demon to be cleansed? Would that just mean his destruction? Did he want to be destroyed?

Aziraphale made a tutting sound and gently removed Crowley’s dark glasses. He folded them and placed them on the table in front of the couch. Then he turned back and began to run his hands through Crowley’s hair, smoothing it away from his forehead. At any other time Crowley would lean into this, would vibrate with the wanting of it, but right now it felt wrong. Aziraphale was going to get this grief and fear on himself too. Crowley reached up and grabbed Aziraphale’s wrists, pulled his hands away.

“Whiskey, please,” he said, and he didn’t recognize his own voice. It sounded raw, like it was having to claw its way out of his throat.

“Of course,” Aziraphale said. He disappeared up the stairs to the small flat above the shop.

Crowley worked hard to pull the different pieces of himself back into one place. There was the innocence lost in Heaven. There was the fury left behind in Hell. There was the curiosity of the garden. There was the anger of Mesopotamia. There was the fear that he first knew on Golgotha. There was the desire he had left strewn across a large swath of this world. There was the love from...from. He didn’t remember. It didn’t fit.

Aziraphale returned with a bottle of whiskey and a glass. He poured a few fingers into the glass for himself and then handed the bottle to Crowley. Crowley took it and drank half of it without stopping for breath. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and then went back for more.

“Do you want to say anything about it?” Aziraphale asked.

Crowley shook his head.

“Alright.”

“I’m sorry, I, I barged in,” he said. The burn of the whiskey in his throat steadied his voice. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“But you are here,” Aziraphale pointed out, infuriatingly reasonable. “And you did nothing of the sort. You didn’t even knock.”

Crowley finished the bottle. It wasn’t working fast enough. He wanted another one. He wanted to sleep for a century. He wanted Aziraphale to know that he loved him, just in case any of this ever went south. To know for real, not just in the obfuscated way in which they related to one another, the way in which the angel would welcome a distraught demon into his home and trust him with his life over and over, but for real, because Crowley had told him. He’d never told him.

It felt like last week, that moment three hundred years ago when Aziraphale realized it was possible for Crowley to love anything at all. He should have told him then that he was the reason he knew it was possible, not for demons, but for himself. At the time, the thought of Aziraphale knowing that, regardless of whether he rejected him or not, had been unbearable. It would have given him all the power between them. Crowley liked at least pretending some of that still belonged to him.

Aziraphale watched him with bright wariness in his eyes.

What did the words 'I love you ' even mean? Surely they meant ‘I would never hurt you, never put you in danger.’ Why was he here?

He stood up, swayed a bit on his feet, but held his ground. “I should go.”

“You may go when you sober yourself up and not before.”

“You don’t-” He took a step forward and the entire bottle hit him at once. The room swayed, tilted, he was going down.

Aziraphale was at his side suddenly, one hand on his chest and the other with a fierce grip on his arm to keep him from hitting the floor. He always forgot that Aziraphale was stronger than he looked, that he had been a soldier. Sure, the demons had fought in the war, had scrabbled and clawed and torn into anything in front of them in a bid for survival, but the angels sent to see them off had been soldiers, trained and ready for anything. Crowley felt like he was ready for exactly nothing and had been for his entire existence.

Crowley steadied himself and took a step back so Aziraphale could let go of him. Aziraphale didn’t. The hand against his chest was so warm.

“As long as I exist they will use me as they see fit. As long as I am here they can come to find me, they can use me against you. I can’t. I couldn’t. I don’t-”

“You don’t have control over them,” Aziraphale said. “Neither of us has control. We just have to do what we’re told when we’re told and believe that in the end the right outcome will come to fruition.”

“What is that?” Crowley asked.

Aziraphale took his hand away from Crowley’s chest, but did not let go of his arm. “It’s certainly not the outcome where you show up in distress, pass the distress on, and then leave me here alone in some stupid bid to keep me safe. I get a say in this too. I had a say in it in nine ninety-eight when we started it and I have a say now. Regardless of where you are, I’m still working against them. I’m still in their way. I promise you that if they come for me it will not be your fault.”

“But if they come-”

“If they come I will meet them. If you let me, I will meet them with you. But no one has come so far. Just breathe.”

Crowley did as he was told. He took long gulps of air. His breath was the loudest thing in the quiet of the bookshop. The second loudest thing was the clock on the mantle. Crowley focused on its tick tock tick and tried to force his breath back into a tidy timing that matched it. The late afternoon sun that slanted in through the windows highlighted the dust motes that whirled through the space. He focused on disturbing the flow of the closest one as he exhaled.

Aziraphale let go of Crowley’s arm and moved a hand to his back where he started rubbing it in wide, slow circles.

“I need,” Crowley began.

“Yes?” Aziraphale asked.

Unable to say the words out loud, Crowley unfurled his wings.

“Oh,” Aziraphale breathed. He pulled his hand away.

Crowley’s wings took up most of the space in the small back room and were in the worst state they’d been in since he’d first crawled up through the topsoil of the garden. There were twisted feathers, vanes in tatters, ragged edges, raw and broken shafts stuck out in a few places. They were matted with dried blood. He could feel every imperfection, the weight of every clinging bit of blood and viscera. It felt like he was crawling with it.

“Oh,” Aziraphale said again. “My.”

“I need to get it off.” Crowley curled one wing in, ran his fingers over the first primary feathers at the edges. He checked each one by feel and worked his way inward. Flakes of dark red stuck to his fingers and drifted down to the floor. “Can you bring some water, can we just get the blood off?”

“That’s not, it’s not yours, is it?” Aziraphale whispered.

Crowley felt so lost in the question. He didn’t think any of it was his. Once the fighting started the humans lost track of him, caught up in their own anger and fear. No one had attacked him. No one had needed to.

“No, I’m.” He was not fine exactly. “Whole, I think,”

Aziraphale nodded. He left the room again.

Crowley ran his shaking fingers over each feather, one by one. Disaster, this was a disaster. He was a demon. He was covered in blood. He hated it. If this was glory he wanted no part of it. He would happily live a coward’s life if it meant he never had to feel another hot spatter of glory against his skin.

“Stop,” Aziraphale said when he came back. He had removed his waistcoat and rolled his shirtsleeves up to his elbows. He had a large bowl, a pitcher of water so hot it was steaming, and several towels. He laid it all out on the table and then reached for Crowley. He forced Crowley’s hands away from his wings. “Stop. Take your shirt off. I’ll do it. You’re just going to hurt yourself.”

Crowley took a ragged breath. “I can’t ask you to do this.”

“You’re not asking. I’m telling you. I’m doing it. Sit down.”

Crowley dropped ungracefully to the floor. He hugged his legs to himself tightly, pulled his knees to his chest, and rested his chin on them. He tried to take up as little space as possible, even though the tips of his wings brushed the walls of the room.

“Shirt,” Aziraphale reminded him.

Crowley wished it away, and then he was sitting half naked in the bookshop as Aziraphale knelt over him and studied the damage.

“This would take a very involved miracle,” he said. “But I could do a few smaller ones maybe, just to get started.”

Crowley shook his head. “If you do that it will show up Up There somewhere. Won’t there be questions?”

“How like you to worry about the questions.”

Aziraphale touched him so gently it made Crowley feel like he was going to crumble. He didn’t know how to withstand this grace. He deserved fury. He deserved judgment. He deserved to be told he was exactly as evil as the Fall had made him. Aziraphale did not give him any of that. He poured warm water from the pitcher over each portion of Crowley’s wings and let it run off into the bowl, then lightly dabbed at the wings with the cloth. When the water became cloudy with the rust color of spent human lives, he miracled it clean and warm again and started over.

They went on that way for so long Crowley’s legs went numb, regained feeling again, and then started to cramp. By that time, Aziraphale had almost made it to the center of the first wing.

“The bathing of bodies, both of the dead and the remaining, has long been a funerary custom on many parts of the Earth,” Aziraphale said. “I wonder if they didn’t somehow get it from us. If it wasn’t remembered somehow.”

“Do you think this was inevitable?” Crowley whispered into his own shoulder.

“To live among them and above them is impossible,” Aziraphale said. He made quick work of a broken feather. “We are involved in ways both beautiful and tragic. Death is inevitable for them, so if we get to know them then feeling the loss of that is inevitable for us.”

Us.

“So you’ve started to become attached then,” Crowley said. “Dabbling, angel?” He wished he wasn’t so exhausted. He would very much appreciate the energy to gloat.

“Yes,” Aziraphale said simply. “On occasion.”

“What an occasion that must have been.”

“Do you want the details?”

It was a simple question, not said with malice. Aziraphale was prepared to share the contents of his heart with Crowley, if Crowley wanted him to. Crowley found that he did not.

“I didn’t have to involve myself. With them or with you.” He winced as Aziraphale twisted something sharp near his shoulder. “If I had never accepted your hand. If I had never let that first one kiss me. If I had never paid attention to the others, known them, touched them.”

These were words he thought sometimes, but had never intended to say out loud for fear that Aziraphale would take them seriously. He was very glad to have the full breadth of his wing to hide behind. He couldn’t bear the thought of Aziraphale seeing his face at the moment. How raw he felt. How raw he must look.

“You could have lived a completely ascetic life of demonic destruction and those people would still not be alive. They are part of a game much larger than us.” He moved so that he could kneel directly behind Crowley and work his way in toward the scapulars near the joint. “They would not be better off without you. You would not be better off without them.”

“But would it be easier?”

“No,” Aziraphale said, “not for you. I don’t believe anyway.”

He shifted and stretched his legs out so that his thighs straddled Crowley’s hips. Aziraphale was so close to him. Crowley burned every place they were touching. He felt damp fingers slide down the skin at the center of his back, right between his wings, and leave a trail of tingling warmth down his spine. Crowley shivered into it. Aziraphale’s hand stopped but didn’t pull away. He spread his palm flat across the center of Crowley’s back.

“Is it easier for you?” Crowley asked.

There was a sound of sloshing water and then Aziraphale was touching Crowley’s back with both hands. He massaged Crowley’s shoulders, worked his fingers into the muscles along his spine, pushed hard against the knots sitting along the ridge where wing became flesh.

Crowley arched into the touch. He groaned with the relief of it and then, in embarrassment, bit his cheek so hard he drew blood. Just more rust for his tongue.

“I think it is,” Aziraphale said. He smoothed his palms up and down Crowley’s back a few times to calm the skin, then he moved away so he could kneel again and resume washing the blood away from the other wing.

“Why?”

“Because you don’t do anything the easy way, and because I believe in the greater good.”

It wasn’t that Crowley didn’t believe in the greater good. He had been a part of it at one time. He believed that something called the Greater Good existed, he just didn’t necessarily believe that it was either Great or Good. Anyone could call an ideology or a plan anything they wanted. The name was merely marketing, the outcome was the thing. As far as he’d seen, the outcome was shaping up to be neither Great nor Good.

He wasn’t in the mood for an ontological argument, so he kept that thought to himself, though he imagined Aziraphale knew he was thinking it. Aziraphale had proven himself uncanny in the last several hundred years when it came to Crowley and his thoughts and wishes. The angel had become one of the very few beings Crowley had ever known that he believed to be both Great and Good.

They lapsed back into quiet as Aziraphale worked. Crowley crossed his arms over top his knees and laid his head on them. He closed his eyes and focused on the feel of the water as it dripped down every individual feather and left him cleaner for its touch. He tried to relax into the space, to let the sensations simply happen to him without thinking too hard about what they were or what was to come.

“Hey,” Aziraphale said. “I’m done.”

Crowley opened his eyes and tried to blink the blur of sleep out of them. He didn’t know how long he’d been out. It was dark outside of the windows.

Aziraphale was on his knees in front of Crowley. He had one hand to Crowley’s cheek and was using his other to steady himself against the floor near Crowley’s boot. His shirt was spattered with light red water droplets and his hands were stained the deeper color of dried blood. He looked like a doctor on the front lines, and maybe that’s what he was. There wasn’t a line much more forward than the two of them.

He patted Crowley’s cheek. “That’s a demon. Come on.”

He stood up and held his hands out for Crowley to take. Crowley let Aziraphale pull him up and then immediately dropped back onto the floor in a heap as his legs gave out from the strain of being cramped up in one position for hours. One of his wings came close to knocking the books off a whole shelf and he snapped them back out of sight.

“Whoa now,” Aziraphale cried. He grabbed Crowley under his arms and dragged him up onto the couch. “You can stay here tonight.”

“No.”

Now that the calming ritual of cleaning was over, the fear had started to creep back in. He knew that eventually his people would come to talk to him. He needed to not be here when it happened.

“They won’t find you here.” Aziraphale helped Crowley tuck his legs up onto the cushions and then recovered the blanket from his chair. He draped it over Crowley’s shoulders. “You think I’d make a home and not ward it to high Heaven against your kind?”

Crowley rolled onto his side and twisted his fist into the edge of the blanket. He pulled it up to his face. It smelled like ozone and brittle papers and cocoa with a slight hint of cinnamon. Crowley inhaled deeply.

“I come here all the time with no problem,” he said on the exhale.

“Yes,” Aziraphale said. “We all make exceptions for—well, for friends.”

“We’re very strange friends,” Crowley said, because it was a thought that had been eating away at him since the early 1100s. When Aziraphale didn’t answer he kept going. “Sometimes when I touch you, or you touch me, you leave a mark. I don’t even know if you notice. Sometimes your light just kind of...stays. And I know what it’s like, for just a little while, to have light in me again.”

“Crowley.” Aziraphale’s voice sounded fragile, unsteady. “There’s light in you now. I can feel it. I work it into my wards. It’s why you’re allowed in.”

“Not mine,” Crowley said. “A ghost, a reflection of you, nothing more.”

He was two steps from falling back into sleep. He could hear Aziraphale moving about the back room, dimming lamps and moving papers. It all sounded as if it was coming from several rooms away. The last thing he heard before he gave in to the black was Aziraphale’s small, far away voice.

“A reflection still casts light, my dear. A candle in front of a mirror can still be mistaken for two candles.”

1862 AD

The peaks of the French Alps were cold. Not as cold as the dense core of dark matter at the center of Crowley’s being, but they weren’t helping matters. Not that there was much on Earth that could help matters, since the one person who usually did help was currently the source for most of his consternation.

The beginning. He had known Aziraphale since the beginning. They could have lived in each other's orbit another several thousand years and Crowley would not have expected this from him. Who did he think Crowley was? A suicide pill? He would never! He had never done a single thing to indicate he would. Why would he survive working for Hell for this long just to end it when things got a little more inconvenient?

Inconvenient was his middle name! His entire existence had just been a long string of inconveniences, one after another, and Aziraphale was simply the close-to-first and also latest in the line of them. Aziraphale: the adversary, the friend, the ultimate temptation, the ever present inconvenience. Aziraphale, for whom Hell was an abstract mental exercise and not a certainty. Who was so full of certainties because he had never needed to be full of anything else.

"You think You did such a great job," Crowley said to the sky. "You made us grand and creative and important. And then You took those of us who used any bit of that on the extracurriculars and tossed us out. And then You left the sycophants to spiral around You and just get sycophantier. Are You proud of them? Your angels."

Above him the impassive sky was shades of purple and black. A dark chest that gave backdrop to the grand glittering necklace of the Milky Way. The stars shone so bright that he could see the halos around their edges, remnants of the angels who had worked on them, halos of divinity like fingerprints left on glass.

Somewhere out there, there was a lingering part of him that was still Holy. Somewhere out there were leftovers of his grand, creative importance. His missing light and warmth sat light years away, taunting him, reminding him of who he could have been. And really, who was that?

How like the rest of the angels could he have been had he been given the chance to remain? How much of himself would he have had to flatten out in order to toe the line? How much of the joy and sorrow and beauty and terror of the world would he have missed out on? Would he have ever known Aziraphale?

“He believes in You, You know?”

He dipped his head and spoke to his hands where they dangled limp between his knees. It felt prescriptive, this bowed posture, but it wasn’t a result of the earthly reverence the humans had when they looked down before praying. What might look like reverence in Crowley was simply a bone deep weariness that he had been carrying with him for as long as he could remember. God probably knew enough not to expect his reverence.

“He thinks he’s right most of the time, especially when he’s wrong. He thinks You’re right all of the time. But You know that isn’t true. You have to know. You made us demons, too.”

He shifted and shook the accumulating snow from his hair and shoulders. His jacket and trousers were soaked through with it. The skin of this human approximate body had gone numb hours ago, but he didn’t care. He thought that maybe, if he sat here long enough, he could numb himself all the way through. If he could do that he could stop being angry with Aziraphale for not just knowing everything he had never told him.

Inconsequential things that never came up like, as long as you exist I have a reason to stay and if you ever cease to exist I will have a reason to fight. In general, Crowley did not like to fight. There was just nothing in Heaven or Hell or anywhere in between that was worth wearing himself away for. Why exert all your energy for an hour when you could exert minimum energy over many hours and eventually arrive at the same outcome?

But Aziraphale was worth it. If anything ever happened to Aziraphale Crowley would fling himself against every demon and every angel. He would welcome the sting of them like he had with the desert sands all those many years ago. He would let every opponent take a part of him as a souvenir of his sorrow and rage and then those trophies would poison them with it.

Or at least he liked to think he would. He might also just drown himself in an ocean of whiskey. Same difference.

He flopped onto his back and pillowed his head in his hands. The blanket of snow beneath him crunched as he moved. Some of it started the long slide down the rock face. He glared up at the sky like he could hold eye contact with the black spaces between the stars.

“But here’s the thing,” he said. “I don’t care if You’re right and I don’t think I’m wrong. And sometimes, when he can be shocked past the blind loyalty and the worry and the fear of repercussions, he doesn’t think I’m wrong either. You would see that blasphemy in him if You ever looked at him as closely as I do. You would see it in his eyes. So what do You think of that?”

Above him the sky remained silent. The stars were the necklace he always thought of them as. They were a million million of the sharpest teeth set in midnight jaws. They were a blinking telegraph message that would never be deciphered. They were ineffable.

“I don’t want things from You, as a rule. You’ve done enough. But I do have a hope that he’s not wrong about me. His understanding of me is infuriatingly flawed sometimes. He thinks I’m a puzzle. He thinks I’m dark as pitch in the center. But he also thinks I’m so many things a demon cannot hope to be. Let me be those things. Or let me learn to be them. Not for my sake, because You have already forsaken me, but for his. Let me lift him when he needs it, because you know he will.”

Anger was tiring. Crowley was tired. He had been for the better part of three hundred years. Something had to give soon or he was going to snap and do something stupid. Like ask Aziraphale to just acknowledge that Crowley was his, that he could do anything he wanted with him, and that out of all of the things in the known universe that an angel could do with a demon, Aziraphale had decided to do nothing at all.

Crowley was tired, and maybe that was a sign that he should rest for a while.

1938 AD

The waking world came crashing back in on him in the form of sturm und drang. Crowley shifted in his sheets, rolled onto his back, blinked up at the almost complete darkness of the ceiling above him.

There were no windows in his bedroom, because it doubled as a sanctuary and safe space. It wouldn’t do to let the denizens of Hell sneak up on him in as defenseless a position as sleep. Any other demon would have just decided it wasn’t worth it to sleep, but for Crowley it was worth every penny. Especially since the pennies had been collected from disreputable sources to begin with. He was only doing his job, after all.

Still, the rain must be very hard if he could hear it beating against the exterior of the building all the way through the other rooms around the thick slabs of stone and iron that made up his bedroom walls. It reminded him of the flood, of he and Aziraphale sitting in a stone hut the angel had miracled to protect them from the water.

The rain had hit against the walls of the hut in a deafening tattoo for days and days, and then after the water had risen enough everything was quiet. The only sounds had been the gentle sloshing of a new sea against an old-fashioned habitation and Aziraphale’s quiet voice as they discussed everything for months. They had argued and laughed and made up ways to kill the time, and then when the waters receded they parted ways.

Sometimes Crowley thought that might be when he fell in love with the angel, but he knew it had happened much sooner than that. He just hadn’t admitted it to himself until the deserts reappeared and he’d been forced to wander off into them alone again. He’d hated being alone ever since.

He wondered how long he’d been asleep. He wondered how Aziraphale was handling whatever it was he had to handle, if he missed him. If he cared at all that Crowley had disappeared.

As a rule, demons did not dream, but there was an echo left in his chest of something he couldn’t quite hold on to. There was a taste of petrichor in his mouth and a memory sitting close to the front of his mind. He remembered the warmth of another body against his on a peaceful night in Rome many, many years ago. The stars had been so close that night.

He wondered how long it had been now since he’d seen the stars. He got up out of bed and stretched to reacquaint himself with his muscles and bones. He pulled on his dressing gown, slid away the heavy panel that blocked the room from the rest of the flat, and stepped out into the dim grey light of the storm.

The flat warped around him as he walked through it. He expected his living space to be as modern as possible, and so it was, even though he didn’t know just yet what modern meant today. He ran his fingers through the deep trails of dust across the surfaces of his furniture and they vanished behind him. The deep shadows of a rainy afternoon also vanished as electric lights replaced the gas lamps in the walls. The furniture updated itself down to cleaner lines, with the exception of the throne and table. Those were pieces he had chosen specifically for himself. They already were what they were meant to be. Crowley envied them that.

The victrola in the corner became the cabinet of a vacuum tube radio. It flicked itself on and started playing a news report.

“...and are agreed in recognizing that the question of Anglo-German relations is of the first importance for the two countries and for Europe. We regard the agreement signed last night, and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.”

“Ah,” Crowley said. He crossed to the window and looked out onto the street. There were a few people scurrying through the downpour. None of them had an umbrella. Probably, they had rightly guessed it would be useless. “Peace in our times then? That always lasts.”

The radio continued to drone on as he regarded the walls and tried to decide if he should do anything about their color.

“Demon Crowley, ” the radio interjected in the voice of the reporter.

“Ngk,” Crowley said.

“Crowley, where have you been? ”

“Very busy,” he assured the voice. He tied his dressing gown shut, just in case. “Out just, you know, causing discord and vice.”

“Crowley it has been seventy-six human years since you last made your report. What do you have to show for these years? ”

What did he have to show for them? He hadn’t had time yet to check on any of the schemes he’d left running. He wasn’t even sure the oceanic telegraph cables still existed.

“Do you have an answer for yourself? Beelzebub is becoming impatient. ”

That was never a good sign. Beelzebub rarely ever made it to impatient without tipping immediately into things like ‘making an example of you’ and ‘doing this for your own good.’ Crowley still remembered the mess they’d made of a demon who had dared to spare the lives of the horses during a requested battle.

“I’d be happy to show them, or you, er? Who am I speaking to?”

“Dagon, ” the announcer’s voice said impatiently. “I assume you remember me. ”

“Oh, heeeeey, Dagon! How could I forget? When was it last? That cemetery? Classic you! Listen, friend, can I call you friend? I’ve got a lot of things to report back. I just need a moment to pull them together. Just been neglecting the paperwork is all. How about I call you back in a day or two and-”

“You are on thin ice, Crowley,” Dagon said. “And you know what lies beneath that down here. ”

Crowley shuddered, because he did. Before he could stammer anything else the radio announcer flipped back to pleasantly advertising lavender soaps. He crossed the room and turned it off the manual way, just to have something to do.

For a few minutes Crowley weighed the cost of immediately checking on all his schemes versus figuring out what he should be wearing to do that. In the end his vanity won out. He miracled a rather large stack of papers from the last eighty years onto his ornately carved table and posted up in his throne to see what sort of person he wanted to be this decade and what the people of the last eight decades had done that he might be able to claim a hand in. It was no good pleading your case if you couldn’t make the perfect entrance and really sell them with a show.

Any celestial beings interested in what he was doing, or whom he was interested in seeing what they were doing, would just have to wait.

1941 AD

Crowley parked his Bentley in front of the bookshop and looked at Aziraphale out of the corner of his eye. The angel looked tired. He was gripping the handle on his case of books so tightly that his knuckles had gone white. The low amber glow of the streetlamps set him out of time as much as his wardrobe did. He had barely changed since Crowley last saw him and Crowley felt an eighty year long emptiness stretch out inside of his chest.

“Do you want to come in?” Aziraphale asked. “Make up for lost time?”

Crowley leaned back from the wheel and looked at him head on. Aziraphale had to know. He had to know that Crowley wanted nothing more than to come in. He’d been sleeping for decades and the thing he’d missed the most had been the blanket-like comfort of being near his adversary and best friend. He missed having someone to speak to, or not speak to, and being more or less understood either way.

Perhaps Crowley had miscalculated their familiarity. He had thought that, once it had grown up in them, it would always be there. They weren’t human after all. They knew what to expect from eternity and at this point that was each other or some other more dreary alternative.

He felt like the world as he’d known it had been remade in the drive from the church to the bookshop and it had very little to do with the destruction writ across the city by German bombers. He and Aziraphale had seen worse and the humans weren’t likely to ease off on each other any time in the next several centuries. He didn’t intend to ease off Aziraphale either.

“I don’t have any dreams for you to pick apart,” he said. “Demons don’t dream.”

The smile Aziraphale gave him eclipsed the weariness he had been feeling since the war had got into full swing. A surprising, reaching warmth bloomed in his chest in response.

“Oh, are you sure?” Aziraphale said, his voice flooded with relief. He opened the door of the car and got out.

Crowley also got out. He closed the driver’s side door over his unsure answer. He didn’t remember any dreams, but he had been asleep for nearly a century. It was possible the odd thought had flitted into his head and gotten lost there. He didn’t know how to check though, so it wouldn’t do to entertain the possibility.

Once let in, Crowley walked around the front of the shop and reacquainted himself with it while Aziraphale bustled about in the back looking for the perfect wine. Like Aziraphale, the bookshop had not changed much since the last time Crowley had been there. Most of the books were in the same places. He wasn’t sure they weren’t somehow glued down. He tested a newer book, a copy of some poetry by someone called W. B. Yeats. It pulled away from the shelf easily enough, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t some other trap at work. He glared at it, trying to make it give up its secrets.

“Stop trying to intimidate the books,” Aziraphale said, coming up behind him. He held out an overfull glass of red wine. “Or at least, try to intimidate something that has respect for fear. The poetry won’t be it.”

Crowley accepted the wine and followed Aziraphale to the back room. He perched on the arm of the couch as Aziraphale made himself comfortable in his chair. Aziraphale made a face of displeasure at the arrangement.

The thing that Aziraphale didn’t know that Crowley could not tell him, was that he couldn’t make himself sit on the couch. He hadn’t been able to since the night he’d spent on it in 1832 and he was a little surprised Aziraphale hadn’t noticed. In the time that he’d spent back here between that and his long nap he’d just sort of paced as he drank, or perched on the table, or leaned against a bookshelf, or on one brazen night stolen Aziraphale’s chair for himself. That had resulted in Aziraphale being hilariously spiky with him for a week and he absolutely planned to do it again.

But that was the past and this was the beginning of their future. He didn’t want to be haunted by this place that was, perhaps, the one true home he had on this planet. Oh sure, he had his flat, but that wasn’t for living. That was for what happened between the living. This place, Aziraphale, was where he came when he wanted something to matter. So he sat on the arm of the couch the way a person might dip a toe into cold water, with the intention of fully submerging himself in it eventually.

Aziraphale launched into a long-winded explanation of the 1890s. Crowley had missed this, and was content to let him continue to talk until he ran out of words, which knowing Aziraphale could take hours.

"You would have quite fancied a silk puff I think," Aziraphale said. "You're always managing to be de rigueur."

Crowley ran an absent finger along the clasp of his braces. "No point in being up here if I'm not going to enjoy it."

"Quite." Aziraphale sat quietly for a moment and looked everywhere but at Crowley. "The thing is, I, I worry that it's my fault."

"The silk puff? You've been responsible for stranger things I suppose."

"No, I mean, you missing it. You were mad at me, right? Might still be I suppose. I really started to worry this last decade or so that something had happened to you."

"Something could have," Crowley said simply, not giving Aziraphale any space to hide from the weight of the responsibility he'd put onto himself. "Why do you think I made the request?"

Aziraphale studied the inside of his almost empty glass. "I didn't know why. You didn't say."

"I said just in case. That should have been sufficient."

"It wasn't." Aziraphale sounded angry and that took Crowley by surprise. "Do you know what it would mean to me if you were truly gone? If it was somehow my fault? Do you know how much I-"

"How much you what?" Crowley asked.

There were times when Crowley loved their dance and there were times when he absolutely loathed it. This was one of the latter, because he felt raw about the world he'd woken up to and the things that had come in between that he'd never have a hand in. Many of those things had to do with Aziraphale and it was obvious, always but even more so at this very moment, that Aziraphale felt the same way. That he wanted to share everything with Crowley, that it wasn't an accident they kept falling together throughout history and that they'd settled together here in this time and place, and that he still couldn't say it out loud for whatever Heaven forsaken reason he had. Crowley could tempt and cajole and poke at Aziraphale to try and force it out and Aziraphale would simply take it and resign himself to the torment, make himself out to be his own martyr.

What a vivid reminder Crowley must be of the ever-present, ever-terrible possibility of what angels could become. How heavy his existence must be to Aziraphale and also, apparently, how worth the added weight.

Aziraphale did not answer. Crowley knew that he simply couldn't, might not ever be able to. That hurt, because all Crowley wanted to do was tell the angel that he needed him. There shouldn't be a rush about it. They were not human. They had forever, literally forever. But there was a building sense of urgency in Crowley that he couldn't explain.

Maybe this just wasn't the night for patience. Maybe he should leave. He could come back another night when he felt less like an open wound.

"Not everything is about you, angel," Crowley said. He finished his wine and placed the glass on the table.

Aziraphale pulled back in his chair and Crowley watched the indignation flash across his face. It was the same fight they’d had all those years ago. I have plenty of people to fraternize with. That was sometimes true, but not currently, and even when it was none of them could ever know him the way Aziraphale did. Not even the other demons would catch up if he ever decided to voluntarily spend time with them.

It was both a thrill and a terror to look into the eyes of someone you had given the power to take you apart. There wasn’t anyone else in the whole blessed and damned universe he wanted to give that power to.

Crowley watched as Aziraphale’s indignation leveled off into thoughtfulness. He shed his anger the way he sometimes shed his drunkenness.

“I want you to know,” he said. “That I’ve missed this in a way I would not have thought possible. I’ve learned a lot from this absence. Mainly that I am tired of our absences.”

And that was it. Somehow, Aziraphale had said he needed Crowley before Crowly could say he needed Aziraphale. Crowley’s agitation blew away. He opened a new bottle of wine from the table and drank directly from it.

“You monster,” Aziraphale said, voice warm with fondness.

There was a feeling pouring into Crowley’s gut along with the wine that reminded him of an olive leaf dropped on the deck of a great wooden boat. It was curious how he never stopped needing, how Aziraphale had given him what he thought he’d needed and that just moved the measure of need up in him instead of satiating it. Aziraphale needed him. Good. How?

He took a drink from the bottle.

Was it just to be this? He could be fine with just this, with The Arrangement intact, but there was an empty corner in his chest that desired to be filled up with as much of Aziraphale as he could get. Could there be something beyond The Arrangement? Would that even have a name? Would God have given it one or would they have to name it themselves, like Adam with the lion? Identify the form in the dark just in time for it to try to overtake you.

Aziraphale had gone back to discussing how much he missed cravats.

Crowley took a drink from the bottle.

Did She know something like this was possible? She must know. She knew everything in the way a river knew the country it had carved itself into. She had touched every part of creation and every part of them in the making of it.

He took a drink from the bottle.

He wanted to crawl out of his skin, to be able to taste Aziraphale’s desire for closeness on the air as it passed over his scales. It would all be easier if they weren’t caught in these human approximate bodies and dependent on their words or their hands. As it was they were trapped somewhere between divinity and the soil the first humans had been shaped from. He didn’t know what his desire for the angel specifically looked like in this form. Thousands and thousands of years shaped more or less like this and he still thought of himself as something outside of it.

He took a drink from the bottle.

He knew the way he had navigated it with humans surely, and that was fine in the way a restaurant’s table red was fine if you had never had the really expensive stuff. It could feel great if you put in the effort. It was a thing he was even sometimes in the mood for, but he didn’t think he could try that with Aziraphale without becoming frustrated by the shallow clumsiness of it. He could maybe in time move his dalliances and whims over to Aziraphale if Aziraphale wanted him to, but he needed to know the full menu was open, so to speak, before he could really put his heart into it.

Aziraphale paused in his story about some writer he’d befriended in the late Victorian period.

“Mmmhmm,” Crowley said, to show he was paying attention, and took a very long drink from the bottle.

What he was really after, what he’d been after since the beginning he knew, was Aziraphale’s holy fire. Not to have or to desecrate, but just to warm himself by. He wanted to recreate that feeling of being covered by a wing for the first time. He wanted that grace that had been extended beyond its usual bounds even though Crowley was supposed to be too far below it to benefit from it. He wanted that grace and he wanted to absorb enough of it to be able to give some of it back.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, his voice slightly pained.

“Yes?” Crowley asked. He finished the bottle.

Crowley did not realize how deeply he had been feeling, metaphysically speaking, the energy of the space between them until suddenly there was nothing to feel. Aziraphale was still sitting in front of him, but Crowley couldn’t feel him the way he usually could. There was just a conspicuous angel-shaped hole in the energy in the room.

There was a look of real pain on Aziraphale’s face. “I don’t know what you’re after my dear,” he said. “But I do not think you will find it here.”

“What?” Crowley said.

Aziraphale winced.

“Oh, uh, wwhhh” Crowley said. He realized with dawning horror that he had not just been thinking about trying to touch Aziraphale, but that he had also been reaching out for it. Subconsciously. “I, em-”

He didn’t know what to say. He was horrified with himself. That sort of thing was, within the bounds of Heaven, reserved for very extreme circumstances. Within the bounds of Hell it was not done at all. It was because of the transference. Because when you mingled the essence of yourself with the essence of another there was no way to only share the pieces you wanted to share, you had to share all of it. Every last blasted thought and feeling and experience would be gifted into the center of your coupled partner. And even if the touch was not accepted, the information was there to be seen.

There was no way for Crowley to know what Aziraphale had seen of him without asking, and asking was the very last thing he wanted to do. At worst, Aziraphale thought Crowley had been trying to take his light from him, to claim it somehow and lower him to Crowley’s level. At best, it was a very rude thing to do without invitation. Judging by the look in Aziraphale’s face, it was closer to the former.

Crowley sobered himself up and placed the empty bottle on the table.

“I, uh, thank you,” he said. “For not letting us get bombed into oblivion.”

He collected his pride from where it lay broken between them, and he left.

1974 AD

Seven years to the day after Aziraphale finally gifted Crowley the holy water, Crowley asked Aziraphale to lunch. In most ways it was a lot like every other time one of them has asked for company. In one very specific way it was a Gesture that Crowley hoped Aziraphale would take in good faith.

They went to the Ritz.

The host pulled out their chairs. Crowley let Aziraphale choose which one he preferred. He sat down opposite him and did not open the menu.

“You should order for me,” he said. “You pay more attention to these things.”

Aziraphale grinned at him over his menu and Crowley was reminded of a young woman he had known in Paris in the mid-1940s who often spoke of love as if it was a battle that had no natural end. She had been a writer, among many other things, and she had put every breath of her humanity into every word she put down. Crowley had admired her fearlessness a great deal, the way she went to the well again and again and did not even imagine it would one day go dry, so it didn’t.

There was one letter in particular, to a man she had some nature of relationship with, that Crowley remembered quite clearly at that moment. I love you, with a touch of tragedy and quite madly. Crowley always preferred comedies to tragedies, but they could both be equally as absurd. Like a demon and an angel sitting across from one another in the ostentatious faux grandeur of the Ritz.

Aziraphale had hesitated to give Crowley the means to save himself, because they were also the means to destroy himself. Crowley still didn’t understand why Aziraphale had thought that was a danger, but he could not argue with his fear, because he too tired of their absences. A true death for either of them would leave behind one Hell of an absence. He hoped that Aziraphale would take this as proof that Crowley had no plans to seek oblivion.

What even was oblivion? Just eternity without angels and champagne and tiny forks for your desserts. Seemed dreadful.

The waiter came and Aziraphale ordered. A bucket with two bottles of champagne appeared soon after. Aziraphale poured for them and held his glass out for Crowley to clink with his own.

“Do you have a toast?” Crowley asked, when Aziraphale didn’t offer any words.

“To finally getting up to speed, I suppose,” Aziraphale said.

Crowley’s useless human approximate heart stuttered in his useless chest.

“Er,” he said.

Aziraphale placed his glass gently on the table and smoothed out the cloth in front of him. Crowley watched his hands, the way they lightly danced over the linens and demanded sharp crispness from them. The linens obliged.

“I do wish you could take off your glasses,” Aziraphale said. “I always feel so cut off from you when you’re wearing them.”

“Now now,” Crowley said quietly into his champagne. “Can’t be scaring the humans.”

Aziraphale hummed in response. To Crowley it felt like that hum had come down the long line of their existence and stopped at every moment of their history together along the way to pick up weight so that by the time it hit him it was almost heavy enough to knock him flat onto his ass. He remembered that night seven years ago, the neon lights advertising love and lust, the tremble in Aziraphale’s fingers as he handed over what could only have been close to six thousand years of trust and companionship. Two things that in the beginning Crowley would never have thought he’d be allowed to have, all because he asked questions.

But a question had brought him here too. It felt poetic. He was very glad humans had thought to invent poetry.

When the food came Aziraphale good and distracted himself dithering over which thing to try first. Crowley attempted a bite of the beef put in front of him. It was quite good, rich and tender in the way he knew Aziraphale liked things, but not something he thought he would want to eat all the time. He cut a large piece of it and placed it on Aziraphale’s plate so that he could also taste it.

Aziraphale beamed at him. Crowley refilled his champagne, leaned away from the table, looped his arm over the back of his chair, and settled in to watch Aziraphale enjoy himself.

As Aziraphale finished off the prawns it occurred to Crowley that The Ritz might be one of the few places that the two of them didn’t look out of sorts together. In the park, on the street, even in Aziraphale’s bookshop, people who noticed them at all tended to assume Crowley was somehow menacing and Aziraphale was somehow bothered by that. It was more often the truth that Aziraphale was the one doing the menacing. Or at least, the snide comment making and slightly manipulative question asking. Not that Crowley was menaced by this, he rather enjoyed it. If he didn’t he wouldn’t have hung around for so long.

The Ritz was full of rich people—and people who desperately wanted other people to think they were rich—and if there was one almost universal thing about rich people it was that they did not care what anyone else thought of them. Seeing a person who looked like a member of The Rolling Stones, complete with draped scarves and leather trousers, swanning about with a person who looked like an actor doing an adaptation of a Dickens novel who hadn’t changed out of his costume wasn’t a surprise. They weren’t even the oddest couple there.

“My dear,” Aziraphale said.

Crowley stopped looking around at the other diners and pulled his attention back to Aziraphale.

“Hmm?” he asked.

Aziraphale looked sidelong at the waiter like Crowley was supposed to have noticed the young man had come back. “Mousse do you think? Or mille-feuille?”

“Whatever you want, angel,” he said, and waved his hand in the waiter’s direction to indicate that he was not the one with opinions. “Get both.”

“Oh wonderful yes, I think I might.”

He handed the board with the dessert menu back to the waiter, who looked between them in a way that indicated he thought his interest was discreet. Aziraphale waited for him to leave before speaking again.

“There is something I want to say. Or rather, feel I should say. And it feels easier here, on neutral ground.”

“St. James is neutral ground,” Crowley said. He poured himself some more champagne.

“St. James has history,” Aziraphale said.

Crowley knew where this was going, and he would not have it. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table, the champagne flute caught between his hands. “It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to keep apologizing for having an opinion.”

“But it hurt you.”

“It annoyed me.” This also annoyed him.

“And you didn’t quite trust me after for a very long time.” He looked down at his hands in his lap. “That hurt me.”

Crowley emptied his glass down his throat and then held it in front of him to spin between his fingers while he thought. The waiter brought back the desserts and placed the mousse, with its tiny gold spoon, in front of him. He put his glass down and nudged the small bowl towards Aziraphale.

“Listen,” he said. ”We’ve both been alive too long to let something like that hang over us. You were an ass. I was an ass. It doesn’t matter. Neither of us is perfect.”

“Speak for yourself,” Aziraphale said primly, and put a small bite of cake into his mouth. He made a sound in the back of his throat that called to mind many other temptations.

Crowley fought back a smile. “Anyway,” he said. “I don’t want anything from you, least of all an apology for you just being yourself. If I didn’t like who that was I wouldn’t be here.”

“We both know that’s not true,” Aziraphale said.

“Well, you do have your trying moments,” Crowley replied, deflecting.

“Really,” Aziraphale said quietly. “You are a creature of want.”

Crowley took the mousse back and tried some. It was nicer than the beef. “I’m a creature that manifests want, not one who lives in it,” he lied.

“Is that so?” Aziraphale asked.

He cut a small piece off the corner of the cake and held it across the table on his tiny fork. Crowley looked at it and then at Aziraphale. The look on the angel’s face was positively devilish. Crowley wished he could put that on one of his memos to Hell. September 3rd: Drove the Angel of the Eastern Gate to gluttony and light dominant tendencies. Will see how much more I can accomplish and report back.

Crowley leaned forward and ate the bite of cake. Aziraphale pulled his fork back with such a look of smug satisfaction that it had to be a sin. The cake was not as nice as the mousse.

I don’t want anything from you because I want you, he thought. As long as we’re apologizing I’m sorry I tried to reach for your light that night. But you have to know it’s part of what made me notice you, kept me noticing you. Please, just let me stay here with you, near that.

“The Arrangement,” was all he said.

By the time they finished off the remainder of the champagne and got the check it had gone early evening. There were grey clouds hanging low over the city. Halfway back to the Bentley it began to rain. Crowley flipped his hand as if he’d been twirling an umbrella the whole time and a black umbrella appeared in it. He opened it and held it over Aziraphale.

Aziraphale sighed and stepped closer to him. “So you’re the one covering me now.”

“Been covering you for a long time,” Crowley said.

“Yes, you do like being the hero every now and again, don’t you? Take an extra chance to do some good? Push your boundaries a bit?”

They reached the car. Crowley opened the passenger side door and snapped away the parking boot on the back left tire and the umbrella together. “Think of it as the world’s longest running experiment in nature versus nurture.”

When he’d gone around and climbed into the driver’s seat Aziraphale said, “And who do you imagine is doing the nurturing?”

Crowley did not know, so he did not answer.

They drove back to the bookshop in a heavy and expectant silence. The sound of the rain hitting the roof and the wipers woosh wooshing across the windscreen filled in the space, but not as boldly as they could have. Crowley was painfully aware of how close Aziraphale was to him, and for once he didn’t think it was his fault. There was a low grade anxiety coming off the angel that tasted different than his usual brand of just not wanting to deal with the unpleasantness of things.

Crowley pulled up outside of the bookshop and left the engine running. “Thanks for coming out.”

Aziraphale turned toward Crowley on the seat and studied him with a furrowed brow. “Do you want to come in?” he asked. “I have something I’ve been meaning to give you. Picked it up almost five hundred years ago, but I’ve just happened to locate it again.”

“Is it those drawings DaVinci did of my wings over his anatomy sketches? I do sometimes wonder where those ended up, if only because the muscles were so finely rendered and the feathers so transparent.”

“No,” Aziraphale said, slow and drawn out.

Crowley sighed. “It’s fine, angel. Whatever it is, I’ll be back this way soon. You know I will.”

“Not soon enough.”

Aziraphale leaned toward him over the gear shift. He twisted his hand up in Crowley’s scarf and pulled him forward until there was only a matter of centimeters between their noses. He tilted his head and gave Crowley a few seconds to pull away. Crowley did not want to pull away.

When Aziraphale kissed him the sound of the world fuzzed out. He couldn’t hear the rain. He couldn’t hear the wipers. He couldn’t hear the other cars on the street or the people on the pavement or even the low grade hum of evil that he was always tuned into. All he could hear was Aziraphale’s breath, the slight click of his jaw, his throat when he swallowed. Crowley chased these sounds the way he chased Aziraphale’s mouth across the cab when Aziraphale leaned back and brought Crowley with him.

Crowley placed a hand on the seat to steady himself and another hand on the back of Aziraphale’s neck. His lips and tongue tingled with the Divine heat rolling off Aziraphale. Every part of him felt warm from the contact. He was never going to let Aziraphale go.

A small part of him remembered that they were on a public street, in a car that was probably illegally parked, and that everyone from the deepest pits of Hell to the highest mountain top of Heaven could see them. He didn’t care. He could feel himself filling with light and warmth and he didn’t care who knew.

1997 AD

Crowley hated politicians. They were just no fun to tempt. They’d already given in to almost every sin, and while Crowley always enjoyed a chance to get creative, he really felt these days that it was a waste to only target one person at a time. But since his little nap, Below had taken to giving him a special assignment every now and again, just to make sure he didn’t go dark on them.

They didn’t know it, but he’d had the light now, and going dark was the last thing he wanted to do.

The man was visiting from America, which Crowley hated almost as much as politicians and had done since 1832. Unlike demons, Americans were very creative and never knew when to stop. This man was a proper specimen of them, with his slightly ill-fitting grey suit and his very white smile. Crowley watched him flirt with a young woman at the crowded bar. Tedious, it was just all so tedious.

In the end it didn’t take very long at all to tempt them out the door together. He’d made it a game with himself, to see how many people he could affect in the course of this. By the time he’d changed up the music from innocuous jazz to drum and bass, soured all the wine in the place, and set all of the fire alarms to emit a high pitched beep every seven to ten minutes, everyone in the restaurant was ready to commit murder. Or at least aggressive driving and rudeness to other people on the tube, which might lead to murder depending on how the night went.

His car was parked in an alley around the corner from the restaurant under a very obvious NO STANDING sign. Unfortunately, no one had so much as given him a ticket. Well, he had tried.

He got into the car and looked around to make sure he was alone. When he determined he was he held his hands up in front of his face and blew into them, as if warming them. Essentially, that’s just what he was doing. Aziraphale’s warmth was not actually a part of him, and it resonated at a different frequency than his coldness did. When he blew into his hands it stoked and excited the foreign particles caught there. It was how he checked how much light he had left.

Crowley didn’t want to be greedy, didn’t want to ask Aziraphale for too much and start another misunderstanding, so in that respect he took what he was given. The problem was that, while kissing Aziraphale lit him up inside in all sorts of pleasant and practical ways, doing his job diminished that light considerably.

He’d been trying to parse out the temptations so he could maintain at least a low grade level of Divine radiance. Not enough to draw attention to himself with his peers, but enough to keep his own chill away. He felt like a new demon.

Right this moment he had only a faint glow of radiance left. The light that appeared in his cupped hands wasn’t even bright enough to read by, and it was possible he could only see it because his eyes were tuned to angel stuff. One had to be able to find their enemy if one was to tempt them, after all.

“Crowley,” said a voice from inside the cab.

“Yarp!” Crowley cried. He clapped his hands together and shook them out to dissipate the light.

Hastur sat in the cab of the Bentley next to him and watched him with intense interest. “What are you doing Crowley?”

“Uh, sitting?” Crowley said, because he couldn’t come up with anything else.

Hastur stared at him, unblinking. Crowley had to give it to them, they had really perfected looming over the last several millennia. It wasn’t one of the more creative or fun demon activities, but a solid position to have in one’s arsenal.

“Your mission is not yet complete.”

“How can it not be complete? He took her with him. It’s not my job to escort them to his bed and tuck them in. I’m a demon, not a nanny.”

“It is if you want to do it properly,” Hastur snarled.

“Listen!” Crowley began, ready to fight for his dishonor.

He was very good at his job, even better than he had any right to be since he’d stopped being narrow minded and prescriptive like the rest of his colleagues. How dare Hastur of all demons try to insinuate that he’d done it wrong.

“This one is important, Crowley. That man is currently in a,” Hastur grimaced. “Happy relationship with the wrong woman. For his importance to bring us glory we need him to be diverted.”

“To a twenty-year-old he met thirty minutes ago?” Based on what Crowley knew about humans, that didn’t seem at all promising. It happened, sure, but so did the discovery of a new planet every once in a while.

“No,” Hastur said. “But, what is that expression. To make an omelet one must crack a few hens?” He was getting impatient, which gave Crowley a not insignificant amount of glee.

“That is definitely not the expression,” Crowley said, unhelpful as he could be about it.

Hastur glared at him.

“Ugh,” Crowley said. “Fine.” He started the car.

“This is important, Crowley, and if it is not done right you will catch Hell.”

“I’d prefer to miss it,” Crowley grumbled.

Hastur blinked out of the car.

Crowley sighed. He pulled out onto the street.

The politician and the woman were standing on the pavement across from the restaurant. A cab pulled up to the curb next to them and they started to get in. Crowley flicked a finger and one of its tires popped loudly. He pulled along beside them and rolled down the window.

“Are you an American by any chance, sir? The company sent me.”

What company? Crowley didn’t know. He hadn’t thought to make one up. Usually the fewer details involved in that kind of lie the better. If he said almost anything at all to a human with the expectation that they would know what he was talking about, they would twist themselves into knots to make that true for him. The human desire to feel like they had it all figured out was part of what had made his job so efficient over the last several decades.

“Thank you,” the politician said. He opened the back door to the Bentley and ushered the young woman inside. “Or thank the company. Not that I don’t guess the money they’re giving you is thank you enough. This is quite a car you have here. I don’t imagine you want to put too many miles on it.”

“Special occasions only, sir.” Crowley waited for them to shut the door and then merged back into traffic a little faster than was absolutely necessary.

“Oh, Tad!” the young woman squealed as she fell across the seat. She regained her composure and draped herself over his chest.

They toyed with each other the whole way across town, becoming more and more entwined in one another as Crowley became more and more put out about how he was going to have to magic the car to forget this ever happened. It was one thing for him to have to live with the memory, but it was another entirely for the car to come to expect that sort of thing. It could become complicated. Especially when the only other person who was ever in the car with him was Aziraphale.

The woman let out a sing-song sigh that turned into half a moan and Crowley slammed on the brakes, rocking them roughly forward.

“Apologies,” he said, even though they weren’t listening. “Pothole.”

Crowley warped both London and time to get them out of his poor car as fast as possible. It was one thing to tempt the humans into lust, it was another thing entirely to have to live with the consequences of his actions. When he pulled up outside of their hotel a bellhop came and opened the door for them.

The politician leaned forward and reached to shake Crowley’s hand. “Have a nice night,” he said. “At least half as nice as mine will be.”

When Crowley took the hand the first thing he felt was a prick in his palm, as if the man had grown thorns. The second thing he felt was that there was money folded into it. The politician laughed at his own joke and slid out of the car. The bellhop shut it up again firmly. Crowley dropped the money onto the seat, feeling vaguely insulted, and inspected his hand.

There was no hole, but there was a shooting chill in his fingers. He shook out his hand. In spite of having been in an approximate human form for a very, very long time, he was not usually in pain. Now it felt as if there was some rending happening, a slicing away of something close from his skin. His stomach turned over. His mind caught up.

“Damn it!” he yelled. He gripped the steering wheel tightly to try and overwhelm the pain in his hand.

He sped away from the hotel at top speed and pulled into the first dark alley he could find. He parked and breathed and breathed into his hands. Nothing. No light, no hope.

“Fuck!” he yelled, and beat at the steering wheel.

It shouldn’t be a big deal. He was not Divine, after all. He should not expect to be able to keep anything gifted to him from another being, but he had enjoyed the feeling of having captured a part of Aziraphale so much that he now felt bereft without it. And cold. The cold was creeping back across his skin. He was pissed.

Hastur couldn’t have known, either about Crowley or that the politician would have given Crowley money, and yet, he didn’t have anyone else to direct his hatred toward. Hastur had done this. Hell had done this. He had done it, but that was on a secondary level in his mind because, and this was the most important part, he hadn’t wanted to.

It felt like Falling all over again. It felt like being flayed, being pulled apart in a way that could not be mended.

Is this what it’s like to live in between? he thought. And if so, do I have the strength for it?

Even if he decided he didn’t, would his desire for Aziraphale overwhelm any sense he had? Would he decide to live in pain if it came down to it?

He didn’t have to give himself an answer. He already knew. He turned his car around and headed for Soho.

2012 AD

As a matter of the only true miracle Crowley had executed in over a hundred years, the Dowlings left for America and decided not to take their nanny with them.

“It will be good for the boy to have time with his family,” Nanny Ashtoreth told Harriet.

And Harriet, to her great credit as a woman both smart and mildly vindictive of her husband at times, had agreed. Crowley couldn’t blame her. He would have hung that man from a tree in the middle of a pit of sulfur if he had been married to him. Then again, he probably would have done that to most men given half a chance. Humans, as an experiment, really had got out of hand in the last several millennia.

Without the family the estate was mostly quiet. The staff still puttered about, but they didn’t have to putter with any sense of urgency, so none of them so much as batted an eye when the gardener showed up at the door to the kitchen to ask the nanny on a picnic. They did take notice when the nanny, who for all purposes was seen by the staff as a stern and rigid woman who none of them wanted to cross, actually gave a small fond smile when she agreed.

The head chef swore to anyone who would listen that she had seen it happen. It was all any of the staff were going to talk about for the rest of the week.

Crowley made Aziraphale wait in the kitchen while he went upstairs to change into something a little less restricting, but as Nanny Ashtoreth had an image to maintain it wasn’t much less so. By the time he returned, Brother Francis was showing the chef how to perfectly recreate a recipe for peacock from the mid-1400s. Crowley rolled his eyes behind his glasses and tried to keep his face stern.

When Aziraphale noticed he’d returned, he gave Crowley the brightest of his smiles. The effect was unsettling while he was wearing Brother Francis’s face. Aziraphale held out his arm.

“My lady,” he said.

Crowley took his elbow lightly in his hand and let Aziraphale heft the basket he’d brought.

“Don’t forget to let me know if you’ll be wanting dinner!” the chef called after them.

“I think we can make do on our own, but thank you!” Aziraphale replied.

Crowley quickly closed the door behind them before he could be subjected to any response to that.

“You’re ridiculous,” he said under his breath as they made their way across the back garden and toward the maze of hedgerows that Brother Francis had installed as a sort of ward to keep any undue demonic influence away. “Where is she even going to find a peacock? You can hardly have one delivered from the local grocer.”

“There’s been one from the next estate over attacking that ridiculous chrome Mercedes of Mr. Dowling’s lately. He seems like a man who would appreciate the justice of it all.”

Crowley smacked at Aziraphale’s side with the back of his hand. “You’re supposed to be teaching Warlock to protect all creatures. You’re going to start racking up the wrong sorts of points.”

Aziraphale lightly patted the hand on his elbow. “Some creatures are more delicious than others.”

“Some faces are more delicious than others,” Crowley said. “Can you put yours back for the afternoon? You look ludicrous.”

Aziraphale squeezed his elbow more tightly into his side, bringing Crowley closer with it. “You don’t,” he said.

“It’s not my preferred style.” Crowley was very angry with these shoes, for one thing. They were somehow simultaneously sensible and uncomfortable. He’d rather just be in heels that knew what they were about.

“No, you do favor softness from time to time.”

“I favor freedom of movement.”

“This must be double constricting then. Tight skirts and tight confines.”

“It’s hardly a small house.”

“No, but you’re used to having the world.”

That was true. They were both used to it. They had come to settle in London, but they hadn’t been forced to stay there. Crowley’s truest worry when they’d taken up these positions had been that seeing Aziraphale daily would drive him to fits of pique from either boredom or desire to try and relieve the cold that lived at the core of him, but neither thing had happened. They had simply existed together on the same grounds in the same way they existed together in London—near each other when sufficient, with each other when nearness was not.

He shrugged. “There are worse ways to pass the time. You remember the fourteenth century.”

Aziraphale hummed in response and led him through the entrance to the maze. They walked the winding corridors until they reached the middle. Crowley eyed the leaves along the way, making sure there weren’t any spots or wilting.

“Now, now,” Aziraphale said. “I won’t have you harassing my children.”

“Then they’d better stay in line, hadn’t they?” Crowley asked one trembling leaf pointedly.

“Come on, my dear.” Aziraphale tugged Crowley to the center of the circular space at the heart of the maze.

He put down the basket and Crowley helped him spread a beige and green tartan blanket out over the grass. It had been overcast all afternoon, and as they pulled out the contents of the basket it started to mist. Aziraphale gestured toward the sky, silently asking Crowley if he wanted a tent or something. Crowley shook his head.

The mist reminded Crowley of the year 998, of taking Aziraphale’s hand for the first time. How long and strange their existence had been, since then and before. How beautiful and terrible. Crowley couldn’t always tell the difference between beauty and terror. They ached in him the same way. It was probably a demon thing.

He removed his shoes and his glasses, which were both becoming more bothersome than they were worth at the moment. Then he removed a bottle of honey colored liquid from the basket and pulled the cork out of it.

He sniffed at it. “Oh,” he said. “1066?”

“You remembered!” Aziraphale’s cartoonishly ruddy cheeks turned even more red in his pleasure.

“How could I forget? Bloody difficult year.”

“Both at that.” Aziraphale pulled two glasses from the basket and passed them to Crowley to fill.

The force of the rain remained inconsequential as they ate and discussed their further plans for Warlock, but the accumulation of it became more and more noticeable over the passing minutes. Crowley’s clothing clung to him. Linen, silk, lace, and wool all matted themselves against his skin and clung to the shape of him. It was not unlike being a snake again. The layers of it all felt like fitted armor, like he might be able to crawl back out of Hell in them if he needed to.

He shucked off the jacket and Aziraphale stopped talking mid-sentence. Crowley looked down to see that, though the silk blouse was a rather dark grey, it was not leaving much to the imagination in its current state. He sat up straighter and twisted his shoulders like he’d learned to do while sitting for paintings over the years, tilted his head as he took a sip of mead and stared Aziraphale down over the rim of the glass.

“Vile temptress,” Aziraphale said, in the warmest, most intimate voice Crowley had ever heard him use.

A small flame licked at the inside of his chest. It was a flame that would not have been there had Aziraphale not put it there.

The problem with Falling was that sometimes it didn’t feel like Falling at all. Sometimes it was like this mist of rain, just a slow accumulation of deeds and words and looks. There was a breath’s breadth of space between Good and Evil. There was even less space between not in love and in love. Crowley felt like had been falling in love for a very, very long time, but he didn’t know exactly when it had clicked over.

Not that it mattered. Once in love, always in love, as certain poets might say. The point was, it felt like his lungs were full of water and his chest was full of fire. Once again, beauty and terror in equal measure.

Across from him Aziraphale’s sideburns were soaked and ragged and his loose gardener’s clothes hung off him awkwardly. His hands slipped on the knife as he tried to cut away a piece of very damp brie. Crowley took the knife from him, wiped the handle of it against the less wet underside of his skirt, and cut off a small triangle. When he handed it across to Aziraphale, the angel took it without hesitation.

“Thank you,” he said, and used another knife to apply some soggy fig jam to the cheese.

“You could get in trouble you know,” Crowley said. He shifted, stretched out his legs so that his stockinged feet brushed Aziraphale’s knee. “Accepting things from snakes in gardens.”

“My dear, with you I could happily get into trouble anywhere.”

Crowley leaned back on his hands and looked Aziraphale over, trying to decide how wise it would be to kiss him. He was chasing the warmth yes—trying to convince a child to do dangerous things would sap that out of a demon real quick—but he was also chasing something else he hadn’t quite put a finger on. The important part was that he never felt like he was using Aziraphale, because Aziraphale always seemed to thoroughly enjoy it. Not that it happened often. There were a lot of other things to do in a life.

Right this very moment Crowley couldn’t come up with very many other things. Then again, wisdom was not in the purview of demons, so he could perhaps be excused for coming to dangerous conclusions. He decided he would give Aziraphale the chance to decide whether to excuse him or not.

He brought the bottle of mead with him as he half scooted, half crawled across the blanket on his knees. He fell over next to Aziraphale, plopping down heavily and landing against the angel’s shoulder, and took a long swig from the bottle. Then he offered the bottle to Aziraphale.

Aziraphale took the bottle and took his own long swig from it. When he was finished he carefully settled the bottle into the basket so it wouldn’t fall over. Then he turned and cupped Crowley’s cheek in his hand, drew him close, and kissed him.

For Crowley the exchange of breath never stopped feeling as intense as it had that first time. His lungs always felt like there was a silt of cinders building up inside of them. Every new inhalation fanned the swelling flame. Aziraphale’s heat coursed through him and drove away the cold.

Aziraphale’s lips were wet, but so was the rest of him. So was Crowley, and the grass he pushed Aziraphale back onto, and the sky, and everything else. So was Crowley’s hair, which Aziraphale was knocking loose of the carefully placed bobby pins as he ran his hands through it. Crowley dug through all of Aziraphale’s ridiculous layers, trying to find skin to touch.

When Crowley had first considered the possibility of being close like this with Aziraphale he’d thought he would hate it, be frustrated at these bodies and everything they put in the way of truly knowing another being. That frustration was there sometimes, the bite behind the kiss to be sure, but it wasn’t nearly as prevalent a thought as Crowley worried it would be. Mostly his thoughts ran from warm, warm, warm to soft, soft, soft and back again.

Because they were not human in true form or nature, and because the bite for them was different, they never thought to put in the effort that Crowley sometimes put in with humans. It just wasn’t about that. Crowley was content to simply kiss Aziraphale’s lips and neck and cheeks and run his hands up and down his skin, warm himself against the fire of him for as long as Aziraphale would let him. He was equally as content to let Aziraphale kiss him back, pull him close with his fingertips dipped just inside the waistband of his skirt, but never any lower, and hold him in place with his surprisingly strong arms. They could do just this, languid and then furious and then languid again, for hours. They had. They would.

In time, the rain started to form itself out of the mist in earnest. Heavy, fat drops of it landed on them and they ignored it. Let me become the river, Crowley thought. If I am to drown let it be like this. Every part of him felt warm. He thought he could hear the rain sizzling against his skin. He was filling up and he didn’t know what would happen if he reached his limit.

In his rapture he did something he hadn’t done since 1941. Tentatively, ever so tentatively, he reached out for Aziraphale with his own will.

Aziraphale made a noise that registered somewhere between dark chocolate gelato and perfectly ripe blueberries. He dug his fingers into the small of Crowley’s back. He slid his hands down Crowley’s ass to get a proper grip on him and tried to pull him closer, even though they were already flush against each other and there was nowhere left for Crowley to go that was not inside of Aziraphale somehow. He twisted onto his back and dragged Crowley on top of him.

Crowley pushed his thigh between Aziraphale’s legs so that he could wind himself around Aziraphale as well as he could in this form. Aziraphale slid his arms up Crowley’s back to wrap them both around his shoulders and squeeze him tightly. He tilted his chin up so that Crowley could curl into the space against his shoulder and chest.

Once they had braced themselves, Aziraphale answered Crowley’s knocking upon his door.

Crowley was immediately overwhelmed by what was returned to him. There was love of course of all sorts, love for the humans and the world and for him, but there was also the protective streak Aziraphale rarely showed anymore because he knew it made Crowley shy away, and the anger Aziraphale had at Heaven and Hell for Crowley’s whole existence, and Aziraphale’s fear that someday Crowley might leave him or might be taken away.

Crowley responded with his fear first, because it was the part of him that responded most immediately to what he felt. He was also afraid of losing this, but mostly he was afraid to be truly alone in the world. After that he shared his own love, because he needed Aziraphale to know that it was real and it was for him, even the love that wasn’t about Aziraphale was available to be subsumed by him if he wanted it. Then, Crowley reached deep inside of himself and pulled out his hope. It was tangled and dark and looked like blown glass brambles with thick sharp thorns meant to discourage curious handling, because if he touched it too often it would bleed him dry.

“What are you hiding?” Aziraphale whispered in his ear. “I can feel it. There’s something missing.”

A lot, he thought.

Crowley wanted to give Aziraphale every part of him, but there were some things he just wasn’t ready to uncover. Not for Aziraphale’s sake, but for his own. He soaked up the warmth and the light. He twisted his fists into Aziraphale’s clothing and kissed his neck because it was the skin he could reach.

Aziraphale sighed and pulled away again. The glow dimmed. Crowley chased it with his lips, up the exposed neck and across jaw and cheek and back to Aziraphale’s lips, where it had all started. He kept his eyes closed. He wanted to hold on to the pure mental image of that light living inside of him for as long as he could.

“Oh,” Aziraphale said. “Crowley. Crowley?”

Crowley opened his eyes.

The first thing he noticed when his awareness crashed back down into his physical body was that the rain had stopped. Everything was still damp, but the warm summer breeze had begun to wind its way through the maze. The air above them looked like the air above a bonfire. The cinders that he often felt light up in his lungs had burst from him, or from both of them, and were flitting through the air against the purple grey of late gloaming. They looked like stars falling back up into the sky. The whole of the universe floated in their little green alcove.

He untangled his hand from Aziraphale’s shirt to reach for one and paused. His skin glowed. Not just the insides of his cupped hands, but all of it. Waves of gold rolled through him and caused his hands to constellate and lightly pulse. He pulled his sleeve as far up his forearm as he could. He sat up and unbuttoned his blouse. As he did, light from his chest spilled across his lap and Aziraphale’s side.

Aziraphale sat up slowly and took Crowley’s hand. He turned it over, looked at the light coming from his wrist and arm from every angle. Then he brought it to his lips and kissed Crowley’s palm.

“This is what you meant,” he said, lips still against Crowley’s skin. “In 1832. You meant it literally. You glow.”

“You glow,” Crowley said. “You burn. You just sometimes also burn through me. It’s a reaction, I think. Because your holiness doesn’t belong in me.”

“Dearest,” Aziraphale said. “Heat cannot start a fire if there is nothing to burn.”

Crowley held his free hand out and twirled it through the air in front of him, watched the trail of the glow follow along in the space just behind his fingers. He caught several cinders on his fingertips. They melted like ash against his skin.

Aziraphale cupped Crowley’s face in his hands and kissed his forehead, his nose, his lips. “You’re so beautiful.”

Crowley tried to think of something to say, but he didn’t think he’d ever learned words that were more incredible than what had written itself across his body.

“Those sideburns are still ludicrous,” he said finally.

Aziraphale kissed him again and bit his lip in response. Crowley decided he wasn’t going back up to the main house that night. He may not go back for the rest of the week if Aziraphale would allow him the space to stay, and that was a good bet, because space in his life was the one thing Aziraphale had never denied him.

Before

The angel who would become the demon Crowley was in his workshop when he heard about the murder. Love was the word being whispered from angel to angel down a never ending line of curiosity and wonder. They had been set to the task of creating everything in the universe and none of them had yet created anything that had caused such a disruption. It was decidedly unangelic to do so, regardless of the invention made in the process.

When Lucifer came to find Crowley the workshop was drowned in light.

Crowley moved around the dwarf star he was building and studied the value of the light as it spread out across the cavernous space. The shadows cast by his movement were rendered impossibly huge across the walls. Proof of his existence splashed behind him stark and undeniable in a size that would overshadow several worlds. The angle of his wings in particular cast the idea of a ship moving across a glassy sea in the darkness of his relief.

Lucifer cleared his throat politely and Crowley turned away from his work.

“Ah, esteemed one,” Crowley said. He gave the higher ranking angel a slight bow of his head. “To what do I owe the honor?”

“I wanted to know if you had any questions about Love,” Lucifer said. “We are trying to clear up the case, close any open mental loops.”

Crowley, as a matter of fact, had many questions about Love, but none of them had to do with the murder. That had been shocking to be sure, but what he really wanted to know was what it was about Love that made murder a worthy response to it. Was it a greed? A desire? A jealousy perhaps? How many vectors could one small emotion live on? How many parts of an angel had to be in pain before the angel would betray their own kind in the most vile and final way?

“I have one question,” Crowley said. “Will it be allowed to stay?”

Lucifer tilted his head and studied Crowley with an intensity that Crowley had never seen in any other angel’s eyes. A feeling of shaded fascination shot down his spine as he met Lucifer’s gaze without blinking or turning away. A small part of him knew this was outside of protocol, that higher ranking angels should be shown deference, but Lucifer had never seemed comfortable with deference and Crowley had absolutely never felt comfortable pretending some of them were from more gilded stock.

As angels they had a common cause, and he felt that should give them a common way to relate to one another.

“Yes,” Lucifer said in answer. “Do you want to know why?”

He did want to know, more than anything. “Will that have bearing on its application?”

“Not at first.”

“Then I can wait to be given the answer when it will be most useful.”

“As you wish,” Lucifer said. “You may come to me whenever you like, if there are follow up concerns.”

“Thank you, esteemed one,” Crowley said.

He watched Lucifer move into his shadow and then through the wall and out of the workshop.

There was something happening, Crowley could feel it. Blood had been spilled and Lucifer’s presence in his workshop proved that several of the angels had got the scent of it and weren’t going to let it go. He wasn’t sure it should be let go, but he also wasn’t sure he wanted anything to do with it. He would keep doing as he had been bid. At least until there was a more interesting twist in the wind.

Crowley turned back to his work. He pulled his loupe down over his eyes and studied the reactions of hydrogen and helium, watched the delicate whirl of them as they spun like dervishes through the gaseous billows of the star. This long slow burning source of light would be perfect, he thought, as a way to offset the brightness of the true sun that they were developing to place next to the human’s main world.

The mingling of radiances, high and low, would draw the eyes of those who knew what to look for. The universe would be stronger for the marriages of contrasting light.

2019 AD

Somehow, against all of the odds in the known universe, they survived Armageddon.

It was not a thing that Crowley had even dared to hope for. Not until the very end at least, when the dead witch was somehow on their side. All he had wanted for the last twenty-four hours was to be allowed to merely exist somewhere more or less safe from destruction with Aziraphale by his side, regardless of what happened to the Earth. He loved the Earth, to be sure, but sometimes a decision had to be made and he had known for awhile now that his was going to be Aziraphale every time.

Finally, he also knew that Aziraphale would choose him. Not God, not Heaven, him. Though it had been rough, uncertain going there for a few days. Crowley was still stung by the way Aziraphale had tried to shove him out. It had been, well, cruel, even if Aziraphale had thought he was doing it for Crowley's own good. But very angelic of him in that way, so Crowley hadn't been truly surprised.

It was the day after Armageddon and they had survived it. They had survived their own sham trials. They had eaten at the Ritz. They had come back to his flat to keep talking because once Aziraphale got started on voicing his relief he hadn’t been able to stop.

There was something lit up in him that Crowley couldn’t remember ever seeing before. The fear and worry that used to show itself on his face and in the anxious way he held his shoulders and hands was gone. There was a new spark of urgency and it rocked Crowley in its wake. Aziraphale’s relief sent ripples through the glassy surface of reality.

They had survived all of it and now they were standing in his foyer because, according to their script for the last hundred years or so, this point in the evening—after they had finished a few bottles of brandy and there had been a lull in the conversation—was the point in the evening when he took Aziraphale back to the bookshop.

Crowley did not want to take Aziraphale back to the bookshop. He wanted to drink some more. He wanted to wrap his mind around the angel and make him give up all the secrets he’d been keeping since they met. He wanted to turn into a snake, something he hadn’t done properly for ages, and wrap himself around the angel bodily. He wanted to soak up the joy and let it blast away the cold in him once and for all.

He wanted to know what Aziraphale looked like. Not what this body looked like, but him. Him? They. What Aziraphale the angel looked like underneath all of it.

Underneath all of this want there was a current of exhaustion that had been threatening to overflow in him for days. He wanted to do all of that, but he wouldn’t mind if first, Aziraphale would follow him back to his bedroom and just let Crowley sleep against him for a week.

Crowley pulled his sunglasses from the pocket of his jacket so he could put them on, so they could both go outside and get in the car, so he could drive until he was alone again. He never wanted to be alone again. He put his sunglasses on.

Aziraphale stepped forward and took them off of him. He folded them and gently set them on the pedestal of the statue of Good and Evil in their eternal tussle. He paused to give it a longer look over than Crowley had ever seen him spare for it. The attention to it made Crowley feel self-conscious.

There were a lot of things he never said with words, but he always got the gist of it out somehow, and the statue had been one of those things. Not so much representative of he and Aziraphale or of Heaven and Hell, but of those two impulses within himself. He supposed he could find a new statue now that he knew the real fight in the world was between not good and evil, but the complacent and the scared.

“Do you remember the Dowling’s garden?” Aziraphale asked, back still to him.

“It was only seven years ago,” Crowley said. He attempted to sound annoyed to cover over how raw the memory was to him. “That’s basically yesterday to us, how could I have forgotten?”

He thought about it every day—Aziraphale’s lips and his skin and the slow melt of them together. How once they’d fallen into Aziraphale’s bed in the small gardener’s cottage they hadn’t left it for days. He wanted that back every day. He never asked. Couldn't find the words.

“Of course,” Aziraphale said. “I think about it all the time you know, how you glowed, how your love made you look so Divine.”

“That was your love, I think. And it’s not the only time I’ve ever glowed.”

This was dangerous territory. Or at least, uncertain territory, which felt dangerous around Aziraphale who had spent so much of their lives being so certain about the two of them and the world. Even as his certainties changed and adapted, took in new understanding of Crowley in particular, they never faltered in their intensity. Still, neither of them had ever said the word love about the other out loud. They said it around the idea of each other of course, and they shared the intense certain feeling of it with each other, but they never said it directly. Never ‘I love you.’

They were so close to a line that Crowley would not be able to come back from. He was terrified.

“I know,” Aziraphale said. “But that week was the only time you allowed me to see it.”

“You, you kept filling me with it. I couldn’t have hidden it if I tried. I spent so long being so cold and then you just, just tried to burn it out of me. Days we were like that. Days. I couldn’t control it. I took too much from you.”

I’m always taking too much from you.

“Nonsense,” Aziraphale said, with an intensity that made Crowley worry he could read his mind without being detected. He turned around to face Crowley. He stepped closer, left the glasses behind. “Though I do wonder….”

“What?” Crowley asked. He really was very tired. If there was to be a difficult conversation they had better have it soon or he was likely to fall out in the middle of it. That would put Aziraphale in a tizzy. “Out with it.”

Aziraphale took another step toward him. “I don’t know how to ask for this. God, I never thought I’d get the chance. Life is funny that way, don’t you think?”

“This century, angel,” Crowley snapped.

Aziraphale stepped toe to toe with Crowley and looked him in the eye. “I want to see you.”

Crowley blinked. “You’re seeing me right now.”

“No,” Aziraphale said. “The real you.”

“You saw me in that first garden. That is my shape,” Crowley said. “Has been since-”

“Nonsense,” he said again. “You may have Fallen, but we’re still made of the same stuff.”

“What makes you so certain I haven’t been rewritten with the dark matter? There’s no fire in me, angel. Nothing to burn celestially or present beautifully.”

“I’m not certain of anything anymore, but I do have hope. I think, maybe, truly for the first time.”

“Side effect of uncertainty,” Crowley said, because he was no stranger to hope. It had been one of his only true companions from the beginning, even before the Fall. Hope too slithered on its belly and found itself in the most unimaginable places, doing things that shouldn’t be possible. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Even if I did have another form, I can’t show you.”

He gestured at the space between their very corporeal, very relatively fragile bodies. Aziraphale tilted his head and considered that space. He looked Crowley up and down, placed two fingers on his throat as if he was checking his pulse. He didn’t say anything, which spooked Crowley.

“Don’t go trying to burn your body away on my account, angel. I don’t know that we could find you another one, and then who would I share the world’s wine with?”

Aziraphale leaned in and studied his face. “I have been behind your eyes.”

“And I have been behind your mouth,” Crowley said.

“They couldn’t tell us apart.”

“I did win an award for my turn at Hamlet.” In the 1770s, of course, before there had been very many melancholies recorded, but still.

“No.” Aziraphale walked around Crowley. “They couldn’t tell us apart because we both felt foreign to them. We don’t feel angelic or demonic.”

“Well we don’t feel human.” Crowley craned his neck to try and follow Aziraphale’s movement. He’d never seen the angel work so hard through a question before. He didn’t want to miss a moment of it. “What could we possibly feel like.”

Aziraphale came to a stop in front of him again. “We feel like each other?”

“Something new.”

There is no name for this, Crowley thought. There is no protocol. There is no...barrier? He raised his hand.

Aziraphale looked at it, curious.

“I seem to remember you liking the bit about the pilgrims,” Crowley said.

“Correct.” Aziraphale said. He threw off a wave of warmth in his pleasure that Crowley had remembered. He placed his palm against Crowley’s and threaded their fingers together. “And palm to palm is a holy palmers’ kiss.”

He pulled Crowley forward by his hand and closed the space between them. He placed his other hand on Crowley’s hip as if they were about to dance.

Crowley thought of the pieces of him people and demons had tried to take over time, of how he had protected those pieces fiercely because of how much of himself he had been trying to give away to this being now holding him for millennia and millennia. He was in pre-awe at the thought of Aziraphale finally taking them.

He promised himself he wouldn’t hide this time. Or at least, that he would try not to.

“Have not saints lips?” he quoted.

“And holy palmers too,” Aziraphale agreed. He leaned in and kissed Crowley.

It was strange to think that these clumsy bodies might be in the way forever, that they had no celestial home to go back to where they could be their true selves. But if he was to be allowed forever on Earth instead of death in Heaven it would be worth that bit of awkwardness. He already knew they could share their essence through them. That was the important part.

Aziraphale sighed into Crowley’s open mouth like he had done so many times now. Crowley wasn’t sure how he meant for the outcome to be any different than before, but the kissing was always nice, so he didn’t complain. Aziraphale ran the hand on Crowley’s hip up to his chest and pushed. Crowley allowed himself to be crowded back until he hit the wall. Aziraphale’s breath was holy and hot. He filled Crowley with it until Crowley feared he was going to be burnt down from the inside.

He tried to breathe whatever fire had been lit in him back into Aziraphale. He felt like he was being taken apart by the flames Aziraphale had lit in his belly and his chest. He worried the cinders would start spewing forth from him and set the whole flat on fire. He didn’t want to perish, not even like this, not when they had made it this far. They had nothing and everything in front of them if they could just hold on to the future. If they could just hold on to each other.

“Just let it settle,” Aziraphale whispered. His lips brushed Crowley’s ear. His knee pressed between Crowley’s thighs. “Just give me some space inside of you.”

Aziraphale’s hands were on either side of Crowley’s face now, his forearms pressed into Crowley’s chest. The weight of his body pushed Crowley into the wall and Crowley felt deliciously trapped by the way his spine pressed into the stone.

“I want you.” Aziraphale’s voice was rough with his need. “I love you. Please, let me in.”

Crowley’s whole body ached in response to that need. He had spent thousands of years taking whatever Aziraphale would give him and now Aziraphale wanted something from him. Some of his darkness maybe. Perhaps if they did this enough they really could balance the score. He didn’t know how to accomplish that or what he was supposed to do. If this was a thing angels did together he hadn’t learned it before he Fell.

“Come on,” Aziraphale said softly, coaxing. “Just let go.”

Crowley did.

Aziraphale’s hands were on his chest, his shoulders, his jaw, the base of his throat. Crowley pushed back against Aziraphale’s weight with his whole body in a way that threatened to knock them both to the floor, but Aziraphale stood his ground. Crowley didn’t know what to do with his hands so he twisted them in Aziraphale’s jacket. He opened his mouth as wide as he could, tried to return a breath that might be life or might be death.

And then his perspective on the room changed. He was floating in the air above himself. Aziraphale was also above them. He was so bright. He was blinding. Crowley thought to reach for his glasses, but of course he didn’t have them. They were still on the statue, on the same plane as their physical bodies. He couldn’t touch them if he tried.

Their bodies were paused, pressed together beautifully in a display of desire that would have made any demon of lust proud. He couldn’t feel Aziraphale’s hands anymore, but it didn’t matter, because the Aziraphale in front of him was burning and his light was touching every part of Crowley.

Aziraphale, Principality, Guardian of the Eastern Gate. He had been a soldier. He had been made for war and that had never been more evident to Crowley than it was right this moment. Aziraphale had dozens of wings woven together in many twisting spirals. They were covered in hundreds of eyes. He had talons. There was a holy flame at the center of him meant to burn the wrath of God into any who dared oppose him.

He was terrifying and he was stunning. He was everything Crowley remembered being himself at one time. He was everything Crowley had been reaching for these long thousands of years. He was warm and golden and silver, but there was something else there too. Some shadow that the holy flame could not quite burn away, though it licked across Aziraphale’s Divine mass as it tried.

There were clouds across Aziraphale’s horizon. There was grey in his wings, black in his eyes, sharp teeth in several hungry mouths and beaks, a serpent tongue or two testing the air. Tasting, Crowley knew, Crowley’s admiration and his desire and his hope. He knew because he could taste the same things on Aziraphale.

Crowley, as he expected, did not still look like a carrier of light. He was still a snake, many snakes in a tangle all reaching for one another around a writhing ball of dense black fog. There were flowers with broad, grey petals growing from his seven mouths. His scales were still black and red, but there were patches of silver and white on his body that had not been there before.

There were wings growing from his scales now too. There were eyes set in them like on Aziraphale’s wings. The feathers were shot through with veins of gold. They trembled delicately in the air. The gold of him was the same pure, unfiltered light that he had made the stars of long, long ago. The tips of Crowley’s wings bent toward Aziraphale and the light that was pouring out of his angelic form in a way that felt inevitable.

When he hadn’t been paying attention his form had been remade somehow. Instead of a snarl, he now resembled the high, pure echo that bounced around a cave whenever a Heavenly note was sung at its mouth. Aziraphale, presumably the singer, had been splashed with the echo. Neither of them were pure. Neither of them were what they used to be. Neither of them were built only for salvation or sin. Both of them belonged to both now. They belonged to each other. They were no longer whole creatures separately.

He reached across the space between them with his wings and his tongues. Aziraphale reached back. The tips of their wings brushed and it was suddenly too much for Crowley to know what this kind of love felt like. It was the love from seven years ago, but it was more than that. It was every piece of love Aziraphale had felt since his creation. It was bright with the halls of Heaven and green with the Earth and blue with loss and red with lust and then golden with Crowley.

Crowley did not think of himself as gold and to see so plainly like this that Aziraphale did threw everything he knew about himself into question. Crowley could feel the call of a dull agony that sat deep in the burning lungs back in his physical body.

This was what happened when a dog caught a car. When a shark caught a whale. When a sparrow bit the tail of a condor. In all the time he’d wanted this he’d never thought he would get it. Now that he had it he didn’t know how he was possibly going to withstand it. Every part of his infernal soul felt tender and oversensitive. There was nowhere to go if he pulled away. He didn’t want to pull away, but he didn’t know if he would survive this, the mounting, eclipsing burn of it. He would cry if there were tear ducts in any of his dozens of golden and black eyes.

There was a tremble on the air between them as Azirpahale reached for him more deeply. It was like the frisson he got from being near Aziraphale while he was doing magic, except now there was nothing in the way to deaden the intensity of it. It rippled through the air and the physical objects around them. Crowley couldn’t tell if the trembling was happening within or without of him. He worried it would take the whole building down. There were sparks flying from every place where they touched. The cinders floated erratically in a whirlwind.

“Why are you still hiding from me?” Aziraphale asked.

Crowley could hear Aziraphale’s voice in his mind as clearly as if he had been using his mouth to speak. It rumbled like thunder and set the black cloud at the center of Crowley into uneven dissipations.

“Do you not trust me? After everything?”

“I do,” Crowley answered.

Crowley wasn’t hiding, not from Aziraphale anyway. It was himself he didn’t trust. There were just parts of him that he didn’t touch very often because he had built his curiosity and hope around them like a moat around a castle. Because he was worried about what he might become if he let those parts of him out to run rampant in the world. It was a conscious decision he made every day to not become like the other demons, and it had to be cared for in the same way his plants did. It had to be made obedient.

Still, if there was a time for disobedience this congress between angel and demon was probably it.

He dredged the moat. The things he sent back to Aziraphale were not love and he was ashamed that he could not meet the beauty of his angel head on with beauty of his own. Demons were not made for beauty. They were made for the other thing.

What he found deep inside of himself was his anger, his desire, his seemingly endless questions, and his wonder at all of the things he had been allowed to see through history. As Aziraphale’s light met these pieces of him, the pieces began to glow and take on a tint of belovedness that Crowley never would have spared for himself. He let Aziraphale rifle around in him until he couldn’t stand it anymore, until he felt like he was going to dissolve under the angel’s power. He closed himself off and the light went out.

The tumble from metaphysical to physical took only a moment, but that moment stretched out, lost not in time or space, but in a completely different dimension separate from the world that they so loved.

Everything behind Crowley’s eyelids went dark. Everything would be dark after this compared to Aziraphale and his light. Crowley gasped for air. He pulled the cinders that were falling from the burning air into his lungs. His hands were still twisted in Aziraphale’s jacket. He gripped it tighter, tried to pull him closer, tried to crawl inside of him. With his lips he chased the light, the painful tenderness, the feeling of being seen finally for exactly who he was. He was frustrated to have fingers and legs and proportions that belonged a certain way. He wanted to crawl out of his skin and back into the air.

He whimpered from deep in his throat, a sound of pure exasperation and need.

Aziraphale had his lips to Crowley’s ear. His hand cradled the back of Crowley’s head so that it didn’t hit the wall. He kissed Crowley’s face and neck and hair. “Sssshhhhh,” he said. “Sssssssshhhhh, don’t.”

When Crowley finally opened his eyes he saw the face he had first felt so drawn to on the wall. It was Aziraphale in his purest form—unsure, but so bent on love being the way forward. Crowley had been falling in love for as long as he remembered. He didn’t know how he hadn’t hit the bottom yet, but he trusted, right now, that maybe there wasn’t one to find. Or maybe if there was Aziraphale wouldn’t let him land there and break himself against it. Aziraphale with his grey and golden wings, his black eyes. His gentle hands, his blue eyes.

Crowley’s cheeks were wet. Aziraphale wiped at them with his thumbs. Crowley tried to turn his face away, because he didn’t want Aziraphale to see him like this, in a state of quiet despair left over from too much elation. Aziraphale wouldn’t let him. He chased Crowley’s tears with his lips.

“No hiding now,” he said. “There’s nothing left to hide.”

4004 BC

Crawley had climbed the wall on his belly, but he descended from it upright on unsteady legs.

The sun came out again and quickly dried the puddles from the now uninhabited garden. Crawley walked along one of the paths and took it all in, the quiet solitude of greenery and shadows that was supposed to be paradise. It all glistened with stubborn droplets of water that shone like small stars. You could fit a universe anywhere it seemed, if you really wanted to.

Beyond the wall the desert was all but dry again. The humans made their way out into a new world that Crawley knew was filled with all sorts of painful and wonderful things. He had watched his fellow angels come up with the beauty and the terror of the world in both Heaven and Hell. The humans would be tested and twisted and blown every way a person could be. They hardly stood a chance, but he liked their odds now that they knew what to look for.

A heavy feeling of a destiny half-fulfilled hung across his shoulders. Was it his destiny to follow after the humans and keep tempting them, to coax them toward all the knowledge a being could have? Crawley didn’t know that he himself had that knowledge yet, but he was more than happy to make that his destiny if it meant he could find out.

He found the hole the angel had sent the humans through on the perimeter wall. It was beneath a clutch of banyans that choked out the light. An appropriate setting for a defection from grace. God had always had a flair for the dramatic. Crawley crawled through the hole on his hands and knees. It was painful and clumsy compared to his serpent form, but it felt important to him to be able to drop out onto the sands outside of Eden on the feet that would take him out into his future.

What was paradise but a place filled with dark and damp spaces growing beautiful things meant to mollify the questions out of a person? Now that he was no longer in Hell Crawley was no longer interested in shade. He wanted the light, and he was prepared to follow the humans to the end of this world to find his way to it.

Notes:

A mostly complete list of historic people/events mentioned herein, in case you want to do any googling later: Jesus, Caligula, Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II), Hildegard von Bingen (Saint, Sibyl of the Rhine), Pierre le Pallet (Peter Abelard), Girolamo Savonarola, Niccolo Machievelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Joan of Arc, the Battle of Torgau, Jane Austen, Battle of Bad Axe (Black Hawk War), Neville Chamberlain ("Peace For Our Time" speech), The Blitz, Simone de Beauvoir, Norman conquest of England.
Thank you for reading this beast and validating the obscene amount of free time I've spent writing it for the last two weeks. If nothing else, I hope you could feel the love in it. ❤

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